Chris Cody 's Journal

One important aspect of cooking is to understand who you cook for. I call it, “cooking to your audience.” For example, steak temperatures are very personalized. There really are five choices but then there is everything in between. I think you can generalize a little when it comes to temperature cooking of meats. Locally, I think a lot of local islanders prefer well done steaks, poultry, and pork. Sometimes, it isn’t well done until every last drop of juice is cooked out. I have never understood this but maybe it is for the texture or maybe refrigeration caused a lot of meats to be questionable by the time they made it to the store or even home. It has always baffled me how one person will eat a medium rare steak but wouldn’t touch a medium rare tuna. Or better yet, a medium hamburger but not want medium cooked pork. In Japanese culture, they love anything that they can eat raw or rare. I really respect them for that. I can’t say I’ve reached that quite yet but I will eat raw tuna, oysters, beef, and buffalo with passion. In my opinion, if you receive quality raw products, you should be able to cook them until they are perfect. In my opinion, you reach perfection when the texture is firm but the item hasn’t lost too much of its’ internal juices and the target flavor has been reached. If you are cooking smoked salmon, your texture and flavor expectations are very different from poaching your salmon. So the rules change according to cooking techniques.

This brings me full circle back to a guest sitting at a restaurant. If that person orders a pork, what temperature will the chef serve it? If they think like I do, they won’t want to cook it until it is well done because you not only lose all your tenderness but it also becomes dried out. According to health guidelines, a medium temperature is perfectly safe. Pork has become a much safer foodstuff because of better farming practices since the 50’s. I really feel that it is worth stating that you are depriving yourself from a great meal if it is overcooked. If you are dining out at a nice place, they will have well trained chefs who will properly handle and cook your dinner. A good chef once told me that the animals we cook and eat live their entire life to serve that purpose. If we mess it up, we are depriving that animal of its entire existence. Pretty heavy, huh?