Meat – What makes meat overly juicey

Here's a couple of hints:

1. Learn to judge doneness by feel. See this answer for a good guide to temp by feel.

2. Learn to judge grill temp by hand. Hold your hand palm down about 3-4 inches above the grill. If you can hold it there for a second or two, it's hot; 3-4 seconds is medium; 5-6 seconds is low.

3. Sear first. Start with a very hot grill. You want about two minutes per side. Do not move the steak while it is searing. Make sure you've given the grill grate at least 5 mins to heat up.

4. Use a two level fire. Once you've seared your steak, you want to finish cooking over a lower heat. Build a two level fire by putting the coals on one side of the grill rather than the whole thing. Then sear over the coals. Then move it to the other side to finish. If the grill isn't wide enough for a two level fire, you could try quenching the fire by cutting off air flow. That will cool it quickly.

5. Finish with the lid on. This helps cook by heating the air rather than just using direct heat.

6. Change your fuel. Stop using lighter fluid. Use a chimney instead. Hard lump charcoal is better than briquettes. It's easier to light, creates less left over, and burns hotter.

7. Rest your meat for a few minutes before eating. Be aware that it will continue to cook during this time, so you want to pull it off a little early.

8. Read up on cooking steak. There are a bunch of good questions on this site!

It seems to me that steak is two things: a way of cutting meat, and a way of cooking it.

Recipes for cooking steak don't to my knowledge vary that much based on the cut of meat...the ideal temperature might vary, and the ideal cooking time certainly does (lean steaks are said to taste better rare, while fatty steaks are better medium rare), but the approach to cooking is the same: quickly brown the outside of the steak at high heat to cause a Maillard reaction, and then cook to the desired level of rareness.

So I think the question is more one of whether there exists an appropriate cut of dog meat to use as steak...the meat must start out tender, so that cooking it as a steak (leaving the inside rare or medium rare) results in something edible.

In cattle, some parts are sufficiently tender for steak, others are too tough, and are usually sold as roasts, so if dog meat is appropriate for steak, it might be important to get a cut from the right part of a dog. If you can find an against the grain cut of dog meat that seems sufficiently tender, there's a decent chance it will work well as steak.

Alternatively, a really good butcher might be able to identify for you whether (and what parts) of a dog carcass would make good steak and cut you one as a special request, but I think it would be hard to find a butcher who has experience cutting dog steak, since Europeans don't usually butcher dogs, and south-east Asians don't (at least traditionally) cook steak: Confucius taught that the use of knives at the dinner table was a form of violence ("The honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen. And he allows no knives on his table." source), and as a result all meat dishes in the region involve cutting the meat into bite-size pieces before serving it, so that knives are not necessary at the dinner table (i.e. so that they can be eaten with chopsticks).