Meat cooking charts

I have used these and they seem ok....

http://www.recipetips.com/kitchen-tips/ ... d-time.asp

A few years ago and after a hearty recommendation I purchased a remote control meat thermometer. You stick the thing in the thickest part and it sounds an alarm when the meat is up to temperature. Like one of these dohickeys Remote Grill Thermometer

I have not had a bad roast or large hunk of meat since. No more opening the oven door to check with the instant read and thus adding another 15 minutes to the cooking time. Stick the probe in, and forget it until the alarm goes off.

I give this a really big recommendation.

I heartily agree with the remote thermometer. I did 2 briskets on my smoker last weekend, set the alarm for 204deg and basically was able to forget about it for 12 hours. The alarm went off and they were perfect.

I'm all for using a temp probe in roasts etc....

I tend to pull my larger roasts that I want rare
a good 20˚ less then what the pre-set suggests for rare.
The pre-set temps are way off IMHO.

for most temp taking I use my trusty Thermapen

Angry Sarah, many tnx! I took a look at that grill remote thermometer and saw instantly (so to say) that it was just zackly what I needed. Even more better was that Tahr-ghay (as we say up here in La Canadia) let me use my Amazon account. Talk about making it painless! Yee-hah!

Geo

Back to the original post, those cooking temperatures seem awfully high - at least for beef which are the ones I looked at. They look like the standard FDA definitions of doneness. For example, 160 degrees is medium, when in reality anything over 155 would be considered well done if served in a restaurant.

More accurate would be

Rare 120-130
Med rare 130-135
Med 135-145
Med Well 145-155
Well 155+

In general, you would want to take a steak off the grill about 5 degrees below the target temperature and let it continue warming on a plate before serving.

Howard McGee has a good discussion of this in On Food and Cooking.

Yeah, those are WAY off. In no universe is rare 140 degrees.

these are much more realistic.