This French Bistro Classic Is Actually One of the Easiest to Make at Home

Steak tartare is one of those dishes most people reserve for visits to restaurants, trusting the hands of trained chefs to safely turn the raw beef into a delicious mound that's perfectly dressed and seasoned. If you're lucky enough to be eating it in a bistro in Paris, even better.

But I've got news for you: Steak tartare is one of the easiest, most delicious "fancy" appetizers you can make at home. We should all be eating a lot more of it—assuming you're comfortable with some of its inherent food safety risks, because, yes, there are some. That said, with care, those risks can be minimized, and frankly, there's no one you should trust to minimize those risks more than yourself. I mean, how clean are those bistro kitchens anyway?

Let's start by discussing the risks of eating raw beef, because that's the meat of the issue here. Everything else is just a dash of this and a sprinkle of that along the road to carnivorous bliss.

Steak Tartare: Safety Concerns and Best Practices

Steak tartare features raw beef, and eating raw beef is not without risks. Those risks include sickness-causing bacteria like salmonella and E. coli, neither of which is a joke, and both of which can arrive on your beef from even the best butcher shop. I need to be clear that you cannot eat steak tartare without incurring some risk, no matter how careful you are.

That said, being careful can go a long way towards reducing your risk. There are several things you can do to guard against the risk, though all measures fall short of fully eliminating it.

Buy the Best Quality Beef

Step one is simple: Get good beef. But then, what is "good beef"? It's easy to make assumptions, like thinking that buying the beef from a small, local butcher is better than buying it from the supermarket. This isn't a safe assumption, though. Your small, local butcher may take great care, but they may also still have beef carrying harmful pathogens—often the contamination happens at the slaughterhouse, which is out of the butcher's control.

Still, buying the meat from a skilled local butcher offers some advantages a large supermarket can't. For one thing, you can have a conversation with them, telling them that you plan to eat the beef raw so that they can guide you to a piece of meat that is as new and fresh and properly handled as possible. A large supermarket meat department may have a harder time steering you to the safest option, simply given their volumes, staffing, and likelihood that more of the butchering process has happened offsite.

More generally, there are a few key qualities we want in any piece of beef we're considering eating raw. First, it should have been kept refrigerated every moment possible, short of very brief stints out of the fridge to transfer from truck to store, or for quick butchery work (though ideally the butcher would do much of this in a cold room). Second, the meat should have been handled in ways that avoid cross contamination—not placed on a work surface that just had raw chicken on it, for example, and not touched without clean latex gloves or properly washed hands.

Talk to your butcher to make sure your beef meets these basic requirements.

Whole Beef Cuts Only

Possibly the single biggest mistake you can make is to buy ground beef for tartare, or to grind it yourself using a meat grinder. Here's why: The surface of a whole cut of beef is where you will almost always find contamination, not the interior.

According to self-professed "food curmudgeon" James E. Rogers, director of food safety research and testing for Consumer Reports who holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology, "Most of the data I have seen indicates that on intact cuts of meat, assuming the meat is not further manipulated and there is no intentional piercing of the surface (needle tenderized, etc.), you don't introduce any pathogens into the interior of that cut of meat. Essentially, if the cow is healthy, the interior is sterile (unless the cow has any muscle parasites, etc.)."

Run surface-contaminated beef through a meat grinder, though, and you will mix all that bacteria into the mass of ground meat. If this grinding happened before you bought it, the bacteria has that much more time to reproduce and reach increasingly dangerous levels. Plus, the grinder itself has lots of internal parts that may not be clean enough—you could end up contaminating the beef via the grinder.

Ground beef is, simply put, too risky to consider for tartare. Instead, you should only consider making tartare from a whole cut of beef, and then chop it by hand with a clean knife on a clean work surface just before you plan to serve it.

Side note: Many recipes instruct you to freeze the beef to firm it up before mincing. I did not find this at all necessary. It is very easy to thinly slice the beef with a sharp knife, cut those slices into very thin strips, and then finally cut those strips into tiny bits of mince.

Practice Good Food Handling Techniques

Once you've purchased the beef, the responsibility is yours to keep it in the best possible condition right up until the point you eat it. As noted above, this means hand-chopping a whole cut of beef only just before you are going to serve it. But it also means keeping the beef properly refrigerated and minimizing times at unsafe temperatures, generally defined as above 40°F (4°C).

This means that you should head straight home after buying the beef and get it in the fridge right away (if you have a cooler with ice packs for transport, even better). The beef should stay in the fridge right up until you're ready to get chopping—and frankly, it's a good idea to have a fridge thermometer in your fridge at all times to make sure it's actually as cold as it needs to be.

Cross-contamination is a big risk when handling any food, so you want to make sure you store and handle the beef safely. While this is a bigger concern in restaurant walk-ins, where multiple raw proteins are almost always being stored near each other, you should still make sure you're not doing anything egregious at home, like letting raw chicken come into contact with the beef or drip onto it.

When it's time to chop the beef, make sure your work surface is clean; a sanitizing rubdown of the work surface with a diluted bleach solution (the USDA recommends one tablespoon of bleach per gallon of water) is not the worst idea. Beyond that, knives clean, hands clean, all the basics apply.

If in Doubt, Use Heat

While my recipe below does not call for it, you do have the option of using the bacteria-killing power of heat to further reduce the risk of harmful bacteria in your tartare. The method is as follows: You take your whole cut of beef and you sear it on all sides in a smoking hot, lightly oiled pan. As explained above, it's the surface of an intact cut of meat that you need to worry about the most, so slapping it hard with blistering heat can kill any bad germs on the food, assuming all surfaces get some contact time with the heat.

The key, though, is to only do it long enough to sear the exterior while leaving the meat otherwise completely raw in the center. You could then trim off the seared exterior and chop what remains, but you'll end up wasting a lot of beef that way. Better, I think, is to just chop it all up, including the cooked bits. When I've tried it this way I haven't found it to be distracting as long as the majority of the beef—all from that sterile interior—is still raw.

Rogers agrees this step isn't the worst idea, saying, "By searing the outside long enough, you probably can reduce the number of bacteria on the surface and that, combined with the meat being intact, probably lowers your risk of a foodborne illness from eating raw meat." But he's quick to stress that you'd still need to practice proper food handling methods and avoid cross-contamination. Still, Rogers is consistent in his insistence that eating such undercooked beef not fully safe, and he, as a professional food-safety curmudgeon, does not recommend it. For Rodgers, only well done beef that's received the "kill step" of utter bacterial destruction will do. For those of us who actually want to eat steak tartare, we mitigate the risks the best we can and then enjoy our probably-not-too-dangerous treat after that.

The Best Cuts of Beef for Tartare

Food safety is the biggest question about steak tartare. The second biggest is what cut of beef to use. I surveyed as many recipes I could find, and bought the cuts most often recommended in them. I was surprised to see fattier cuts like ribeye and tougher cuts like beef chuck on some lists, but I tried them just to see. Also included in my tests were more obvious options like lean tenderloin and tri tip, which comes from the sirloin.

My results were clear: Tenderloin was my clear favorite and the favorite of several tasters I asked to join me in experimentally gnawing on raw cow. While tenderloin isn't considered the most flavorful beef cut, we all found it perfectly beefy in its raw state, and its tenderness and leanness were both major pluses, making it easy and pleasant to chew and eat. Tenderloin is also a no-waste cut thanks to its lack of large fat veins and rubbery connective tissue. It's not the cheapest piece of beef, but you'll at least use every bit of it in your tartare.

The fattier cuts, on the other hand, were all unpleasantly greasy, and while one could trim off as much fat as possible before mincing, that's an expensive undertaking with a lot of scrap waste. Tougher cuts like the chuck were also not fun to eat, and not even mincing the beef even more finely (what I call the "use the knife to pre-chew the meat" approach) could overcome it.

Bottom line: Based on this, you should seek out the leanest, most tender cut of beef you can, ideally the tenderloin, though others like the tri tip (from the bottom sirloin) and top sirloin can work.

The Art of Raw Beef: Flavorings and Serving

Alright, here we are and we haven't even talked about making actual tartare yet. Well, that's because this is the easy part. There are a million things one could do with steak tartare, but I'm going to keep it classic.

A good tartare features raw beef minced into small nubbins with a sharp knife and then dressed with fat, salt, and flavorings. Let's break the main ones down:

• The Fat: There are two routes here. You can either dress the beef with oil, often olive oil though you can opt for a neutral one like grapeseed, or you can dress it with mayonnaise. I've tried both and either is a great option, but I ultimately settled on mayo. The beauty of mayonnaise in tartare is that it does more than just gloss the meat in fat, it acts as a flavor-enhancing sauce that lightly binds the beef in a perfect dressing. It's worth noting that this fatty coating on the beef plays an important technical role: It prevents the proteins in the chopped beef from binding and forming a sticky, sausage-like texture when you mix it all together.
  
  It's important to use a homemade mayo, though, since store-bought mayos tend to be thicker and creamier, giving the beef a heavier coating that can make it look too much like potato salad. But not all homemade mayos are the same. This is a situation where I much prefer to use a hand-whisked one, since hand-whisked mayo is even less thick and creamy than homemade mayo that's been blended with a motorized tool. Hand-whisked mayonnaise is a little looser and more sauce-like and, as a result, dresses the beef more delicately without making it thick and stodgy. That said, any homemade mayo will work and is better than store-bought.
  
• The Balancers: Beef dressed in oil or mayo is all richness, so flavor-balancing ingredients are required. Of course you need salt, and a bit of pepper is a nice addition too. A small amount of vinegar (I like wine vinegars for this) helps offset the meaty richness, though to be clear the goal is not to make the tartare noticeably sour, so go light. If using mayo, you may still need to add a touch of extra vinegar or even some more oil just to dial in the texture and flavor of the mixture. While not at all required, a few discreet drops of fish sauce or a delicate splash of Worcestershire sauce underscore the beef's meaty, savory depth without overpowering its natural flavor.
  
  Mustard is another helpful balancing agent in tartare—its piquancy is a foil to the intensity of the raw beef, similar to how horseradish can be so welcome on raw clams and wasabi can make sushi and sashimi better. Because I make my mayo with mustard, I taste the mayo-dressed beef first and decide if it needs extra mustard before adding it.
  
• The Add-Ins: Much of the fun of steak tartare comes from the minced add-ins like salty-tart cornichons and capers, pungent shallots, and fresh herbs like parsley and chives. Those are just the basics though, so feel free to get creative—anything that enhances the texture and provides pops of acidity and saltiness is especially welcome.
• The Optional Egg Topper: Tartare is often served with a raw chicken egg yolk or whole quail egg on top. It's not essential, especially if you're using an egg-rich mayo, but the yolk can dress the beef even more decadently in a bath of vibrant and velvety fat.
  
  If you're eating tartare, you're probably not too concerned about the low foodborne illness risk, but adding a raw egg yolk (as well as using mayo made with raw egg) does add another possible vector of contamination. One solution: Use a sous vide bath to "pasteurize" your eggs (quotation marks because it's not foolproof). Not only does it reduce the risk of salmonella from the egg, but the low heat of the sous vide bath gently thickens the yolk's texture so that it flows out in a silky yellow wave that coats the beef like a proper sauce.

The last decision you have to make is how to serve your tartare. One popular way is to dress the beef with the basics—oil or mayo, salt and pepper, vinegar—and then put it on a plate with all the other mix-ins on the side for the diners to add to-taste. The other is to do all the mixing in the kitchen and then just serve the tartare as a completed thought.

There's no wrong answer, the tartare will be great—and possibly better and safer than most restaurant versions—as long as you've attended to all the other details.