Cooking For Engineers

[SirSpice]

What kind of restaurunt is this? Most restaurunts serve all the guests at a table at the same time.

[Guest]

Finally something I can speak to with some semblance of a good knowledge base (practicing physician).

Beef.. as metioned before the contamination comes from contaminated surfaces being ground into the ground beef mixture. A good butcher should be willing to grind a single chuck steak into hamburger for you minimizing external contamination. E coli and other enteric bacteria are the common culperates and cooking to med rare or more will kill this. It it possible to have fine tartar if yuo minimize the surfaces compromising the ground beef.

Chicken/Fowl you should always assume are contaminated with Campylobacter and Salmonella. Again cooking to med rare or beyone will kill these. I would not recommend a tartar with these.

[GaryProtein]

If you have a stand mixer (I speak with personal knowledge of the Kitchenaid) just get a meat grinder attachment or pulse cubes of meat in the food processor, and do your own. They are easy to clean and you don't have to worry about anybody messing up with dirty surfaces or mixing pork, poultry and beef in the same unclean grinder. If you want to be really compulsive (I'm not that compulsive about this--well rinsed beef is fine for me) you can take a large cut of beef, cut off the outer layer and grind the inner part which will not have touched the outside world until trim it. Then, with that, you can make anything you want from tartar to well done burgers and make well done burgers from the outer layer.