Only 6% Of People Prefer Steak To Be Cooked This Way

There's just something about a steak that no other meat can match. Plain baked chicken – meh. Ditto for fish. Even pork chops on their own are in need of saucing up. Steak, on the other hand, needs very little in the way of embellishment to make for a meal fit for a tycoon (and you may need to be one in order to afford all but the cheapest cuts these days). To create the perfect steak, all you need to do is apply heat and a sprinkle of salt and voilà! C'est magnifique.

As to how to cook that steak, there are no shortage of methods: go caveman by cooking with fire, use your broiler, sear the steak in a pan, or if you're blessed with relatives who gift you with pricey kitchen gadgets, feel free to bust out that sous vide machine. (Never cook steak in your toaster, though.) Not only do you have your choice of cooking methods, all of them capable of making the perfect steak if you get the timing just right, but you can also choose your preferred degree of doneness. Just try doing this with chicken – or rather, don't, since a "medium rare" drumstick may result in unpleasant consequences of a digestive nature. Of all the ways to order your steak, these being rare, medium-rare, medium, medium-well, and well-done, which one is best? Mashed polled 55,000 people worldwide, and you might be surprised to learn which option was the least popular.

It came as no surprise to find out that the way most people prefer their steak is medium-rare. The warm-and-red-inside option dominated the poll with a beefy 47% of the vote, so evidently, the majority agree with Omaha Steaks' assessment that medium-rare provides the best steak texture. Coming in a distant second was the slightly less tender, pinkish-colored medium, preferred by 22% of pollees. Medium-well steak, which is brown and firm inside, was chosen by 14% of our respondents, while the much-maligned well-done was second-to-last, earning just 10% of the vote despite being the favorite of a certain former POTUS and defended by at least one chef.

What might surprise you, however, is finding out that there's one type of steak that's even less popular than is the dry, tending-toward-tough well-done: rare, favored by just 6% of poll participants. We didn't even ask about the ultra-rare blue steak but would speculate that those numbers would be lower still. Hmm, go figure, despite all of our bravado about wanting to eat beef that's still on the hoof, it seems that most of us still find the sight of blood on our plates somewhat off-putting.