Is it rare to find diners who prefer a well-done steak?

How do you like your steak? Rare, where it's bright red in the middle? Or well-done, where you don't see event a hint of pink?

This question often comes up when I'm judging cooking contests. Medium-rare is the standard on steaks and beef roasts, and cooks are docked points if they go over that.

I've talked to several chefs about this. They tell me beef is more tender and juicy when the interior is still reddish pink. Some of them say they don't see why anyone would put out the money on a high-end steak and then "ruin" it by ordering it well-done.

In his book "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly" (Harper Collins, $14.95), Anthony Bourdain writes that a chef will hold the "well-done" customer in contempt for "destroying his fine food."

He said it's a time-honored tradition to pass off a "tough, slightly skanky cut of sirloin that's been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile" on "some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won't be able to tell if what he's eating is food or flotsam."

He also writes that when he worked in New York City's Rainbow Room, if someone ordered their chateaubriand (beef tenderloin for two) served well-done, it was thrown into the deep-fryer until crisp, "Then tossed into an oven to incinerate further until pick-up."

Given this attitude, I guess I'm pretty daring to publicly admit that I'm one of those unsophisticated diners who likes a steak cooked medium-well to well-done.

It's not that I'm afraid of food poisoning. A steak, unlike a ground-beef patty, doesn't need to be cooked well-done in order to avoid E. coli and so on. Although the outside meat of a cut of beef has been exposed to bacteria and potential contaminants, the inside is considered sterile.

So, searing the steak on the outside kills the bad stuff and makes it safe to eat, even if the inside is still reddish. (But this doesn't apply to ground beef or chopped steaks. When the meat is ground up, the exposed outside gets mixed up with the inside meat, so it needs to be fully cooked to 160 degrees to kill any bacteria.)

I like my steaks medium-well because I like the caramelized "browned" flavor. And frankly, I just don't enjoy chewing bloody meat or seeing blood pooling on my plate as I cut into my meat. It just makes me feel sorry for the cow.