With another round of holiday meals upon us, here is a tip for getting your protein cooked properly. I know there are many sites that list temperatures with a chart and I find it helpful for a reference, but not so helpful during the cooking process. So I am going to attempt to provide some rules to make it easier for you to use. Let’s start with safe internal temperatures for proteins.

Simple rule: if its name starts with “P” (pork and poultry), then 165 and for everything else, 145 degrees will do. Please refer to full chart here.

Now on to the fun stuff. What is the temperature of medium rare? I am going to provide a simple way to remember. The temperature charts are an easy reference but difficult to use while cooking. Rare temperature is 125 degrees, which should be your starting point and for every temperature level above that you simply add 10 degrees. For medium, it is two levels above rare and the temperature is 145 degrees. I think it is pretty easy to remember the temperature by name only. Look at the temperature by name chart here.

Bon Appetit!