Sous vide medium-rare burgers?

Many thanks for all of the helpful replies!

A thick burger, seared and even a little charred on the outside, and not raw but very pink, reddish juices dripping down your chin (or in my case, soaking into my beard), oh, man, practically heaven.  But it's been years.  I know that most of the time you can get away with eating raw burger even from the supermarket and you'll be fine.  It's just that the danger isn't a pretty small chance of catching a cold, but a pretty small chance of being desperately, miserably sick, maybe winding up in a hospital exploding from both ends in misery and despair.  <shudder>  Nope, not going to take that risk if I can help it!  And I'm elderly enough, now, that I'm in a group (as are young children!) who actually can die from food borne illnesses, and I'm not super excited about dying in general, but man, that is NOT a way to die...

I'm probably going to break down and try sous vide, one of these days, and it just occurred to me that this might be a good reason.  I'm concerned about @bettysnephew's comment, though, that the texture wasn't good, but I just took @Cen-Tex Smoker's suggestion and Googled it, and indeed found lots of hits about it, so I'm going to read some.

Thank again to all!

bettysnephew said:

@Theophan
 After further thought, I did vacuum seal the burgers. Perhaps if they were done in the ziplock baggie technique the texture would be better as the meat would not be as compressed. I may try this one more time to be sure because I also liked the flavor and being able to have a medium rare burger was a delight.

I read a bunch of articles on the Web this morning, and I'm less excited about it than I was.  It sounds like doing them at 130° sous vide won't give a medium-rare burger, after all, but a medium one, and that to get a medium-rare burger, you have to go lower than 130°, which means the meat won't get pasteurized, after all, which, for me, was the main attraction of the sous vide approach to burgers.

So I think for me, anyway, for medium-rare burgers, it's back to starting with uncontaminated meat.  Strictly speaking, there is no such thing, but it sounds to me as though grinding my own would dramatically lower the risk.

fishlessman said:

... it was the lettuce, ... nothing worse than sitting on the throne holding a bucket i cant even eat one slice on a burger

Yeow!  Very sorry about the lettuce, but I'm with you about what sure ain't pleasant, and is well worth avoiding!  It's too bad, though.  I like salad a lot less than meat, but I still like salad.

Nature Boy said:

I dunno about thèse sous vide burgers. ... the Egg cooks a perfect burger by searing on one side, flipping, and searing on the other side. I mean, it's done. Unless you want a 3 inch burger, why complicate it?

bgebrent said:

I'm with you brother.  Overthinking going on.

Guys, you must not have read the whole thread.  To me, a "perfect burger" is very much more pink than I'm willing to cook ground beef these days because of the very dangerous bacteria that affect meat, these days.  So I cook burgers medium, now, or even well, instead of medium-rare.  It's not that I don't know how to cook a medium-rare burger on the Egg; it's that doing so, especially with store-bought ground meat, is a risk I'm not willing to take at my age.  Old people can die from foodborne illness!

I was asking about sous vide because it might be able to pasteurize the ground beef so it's safe to eat even though very pink.

bgebrent said:

Appreciate that @Theophan, I did read the whole thread and understand your question.  I believe our point is MR burgers are not as unsafe as you believe.  Carpaccio is still served in restaurants.  I grew up eating raw ground beef with S & P.  Don't do that now but I do trust modern processing and my immune system to take care of business.  I like your question, but still think it's an overthink.  Always enjoy your thoughtful posts brother.

I appreciate your kind and gentle comments, and I'm sorry if I misunderstood.

I admit that I lean pretty hard toward the paranoid side of things, but that's partly out of having studied up on a lot of this stuff, and facts suggest that your faith in modern processing is unfounded.  What you're really putting your faith in, it seems to me, is in being lucky.  There are 96,000 illnesses, 3,200 hospitalizations and 32 deaths EVERY YEAR just from one specific bacterium (E. coli O157:H7 -- see below) most commonly associated with ground beef.  Given that there are more than 300 million people in the US, those a relatively small numbers, so your chances are pretty good and trusting in luck, statistically speaking, will work out most of the time.  But the fact is that really bad things DO happen to real human beings in the US every year from eating undercooked ground beef.  Check this out (from this page):

E. coli

E. coli O157:H7, the pathogen most commonly associated with ground beef, causes an estimated 96,000 illnesses, 3,200 hospitalizations and 31 deaths in the U.S. each year, adding up to $405 million in annual healthcare expenses.

CDC tracked 391 E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks in the 10 years between 2003 and 2012. Between those outbreaks, the agency confirmed 4,930 cases of illness, with 1,274 (26 percent) hospitalizations, 300 (6 percent) cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), and 34 deaths.

... Breaking those beef sources down even further reveals that ground beef causes 69 percent of related outbreaks, while steak is linked to 14 percent and “other” beef to 17 percent.

... Beef was also found to be much more likely to sicken people who cooked it at home compared to eating out. According to the data, private home cooking accounted for 33 percent of all E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks, but it accounted for 56 percent of all beef-related E. coli outbreaks.

Yeah, I'm not eating undercooked ground beef.