[Scorch]

It’s all the premade frozen patty’s fault as they usually are made from cuts of meat that are more vulnerable to E. coli

The official “safe” temperature for hamburger meat, as enshrined in municipal codes and provincial acts across Canada, is 71 degrees Celsius, eight degrees higher than the generally accepted threshold for medium rare. “At 71 degrees … you’re basically turning your meat into shoe leather; protein with no moisture left in it,” said Gilbert Noussitou, chair of culinary arts at Victoria, B.C.’s Camosun College. The French-born chef compared it to the difference between a fresh, juicy apricot or a dehydrated apricot slice pulled from the bottom of a bag of trail mix.

ReFuel Restaurant in Vancouver has gained a reputation as one of the few establishments on the West Coast in which burgers are offered “to order.” All the restaurant’s burgers come from neck meat sourced by proprietor Robert Belcham and dry aged for 30 days. Then, chefs carefully strip the meat of fat and sinew, dice it up and grind it fresh daily. The risk, said Mr. Belcham, is no greater than a medium-rare steak, and the taste is captivating. Once a person tries a medium rare burger, it’s ‘‘‘where have you been all my life?’” he said.

Hamburgers, more so than most illness-prone foods, remain subject to an odd double standard. Raw sushi remains largely unregulated. Any Ethiopian restaurant worth its salt offers gored gored (raw beef) and this month, Toronto’s prestigious Royal York Hotel is hosting the Great Toronto Tartare-Off, a showcase of raw minced steak mixed with raw egg. “Somehow, somewhere along the way we’ve been conditioned to think that if you see pink in a burger it means someone’s trying to kill you,” said Donald Kennedy, manager of the Victoria, B.C.-based Victoria Burger Blog.

According to chefs, the fault lies with a product completely removed from the traditional, fresh-ground beef patty they learned to make in culinary school: The frozen, heavily spiced, pre-packaged hamburger “hockey puck.” Hardly the product of a single ground-up steak, these patties are packed with a wide array of beef leftovers ranging from gristle to sinew to intestines, the incubators for E. coli. A single patty can contain fragments of hundreds of cows, raised on feedlots thousands of kilometres apart. “It has increased the risk of contamination greatly over the years,” said Mr. Noussitou. Even the most die-hard fan of medium-rare burgers avoids eating frozen patties at anything less than well-done. “I would never want to eat a frozen hamburger patty medium rare because I just don’t know the providence of the meat,” said Mr. Belcham.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada...ous-as-thought