Done Versus Safe: What You Need to Know
Webster’s Dictionary defines “doneness” as the condition of being cooked to the desired degree. This includes subjective qualities, like a food’s appearance, texture, and optimum flavor. The USDA defines Safe (for whole muscle beef) as being cooked to 145⁰
That being said, I am not opposed to eating a well prepared rare or medium rare piece of meat.
I have a great deal of respect for you as well as other posters to this thread and have benefitted well from some of the knowledge you’ve shared on this site. However, because of what I have read and/or been taught I must respectfully disagree with several things said in this thread.
By no stretch of the imagination do I believe I am an expert, but as I understand the Whole Intact Muscle rule, you don't want the probe to violate the muscle group unless you treat it as a violated meat. By delaying the insertion of the probe until the outside of the meat has been sterilized you can safely under cook the rest of the muscle group and show compliance. As I understand USDA guidelines sterilization is accomplished when the outer ½ inch of the muscle group has reach 145⁰ which can be easily done by smoke cooking at 200⁰. This is considered sterilization and not pasteurization.
The 4 hour rule is in the 2009 food code
(B) If time temperature control is used as the public health control up to a maximum of 4 hours:
Again this is to say the no food shall have a cumulative temperature abuse of more than 4 hours. It is also qualified with potentially hazardous foods, raw meat being potentially hazardous.
We are of course treating the smoker hobbyist as a professional chef using the pro guidelines to establish what would happen in a commercial kitchen.
This is done assuming the smoker hobbyist is striving for the pro level results and thus needs released from the shackles of the home cook rules. This is the reason to use the Food Code for the smoker hobbyist on the site. Their (Serious hobbyist smoker) level of knowledge and skill is well above the "home cook or consumer cook" and as such they need information on how to properly interpret those guidelines so they can push their skills into the pro arena. There is a whole body of work that is also suppose to be used in conjunction with the Food Code, Haccp, Whole Intact Muscle, etc etc and numerous papers and position clarifications that come out from FSIS. Several qualified food safety professionals are on this site to share their information on how the commercial kitchen does the advanced techniques safely. This helps the smoker hobbyist continue to push the envelope safely.
If home smoker is not in this mind set it would be best to use the consumer/home cook rules. These rules are much more restrictive to keep the uninformed from killing their family and/or friends. These rules limit people to two hours maximum and one hour when the ambient temperature is above 90 F. That book can be downloaded at the link below. A lot of people on this site are really pushing into the commercial realm and need the information offered from the commercial world, much of which won't be black and white or a written yes or no, it is left that way on purpose so we can do what we do safely. For the "show it to me in black and white crowd the Consumer Kitchen Companion was developed to keep people safe.