While meat-loving foodies may swoon for steak tartare or yukhoe, eating raw beef dishes like these or even rare cooked beef can potentially make you very sick. Food poisoning can occur if the raw or undercooked beef is contaminated with a disease-causing organism. Cooking beef steaks or roasts to an internal temperature of 145 F followed by resting the meat for 3 minutes before eating kills most of these germs. Ground beef must be cooked to an internal temperature of 160 F.