Tenderness for one person may be inedible toughness for another. It depends on qualities of the meat, strength of teeth and jaws, and cultural expectations, even at medium rare temperatures. I tried ribeyes sirloin, tenderloin and NY strip Choise steaks at 1, 2 ,21/2 and 3 hours at 130 degrees.The only ones I found tender enough to be chewable and enjoyable were at 3 hours. That’s me, find your tenderness regardless of charts.
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This is correct. Although at medium rare the conversion from collagen to gelatin is very slow. Most steak cuts are ‘naturally tender,’ that is they are cut from low work muscle groups. As such they don’t require a lot of collagen conversion.
Even so, some people like their steaks cooked for 6 hours and some like 2.
The idea is to experiment until you find your happy zone. Record each experiment, time, temp, cut, finish and review. Enjoy the learning process.
To help Community members undertaking tough experiments like Doc’s it should be known that in sensory evaluation most people can’t detect noticeable differences in most factors that are less than two times in difference. That’s a doubling of each step in a sequence. I have found in cooking times that to be a sequence of 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 16. and so on.
I hope that saves you some time and meat.
That also applies to seasoning in cooking and recipe development. If you find 1 teaspoon of an herb tastes insufficient, you will need a total of 2 teaspoons to achieve a noticeable difference.