Is it safe to cook a steak that was left out (raw) for 7 hours?

It's perfectly safe to cook it, as long as you don't plan to eat it. The exception is if the water was at or below fridge temperature to begin with. When food temperature enters the "danger zone" of 40-140F/4-60C, there's a lag time of 2 hours before bacteria go into exponential replication. Any longer, and the bacteria counts start to increase exponentially, doubling every 30 minutes to an hour. With the bacteria counts, the risk of food poisoning increases exponentially. 7 hours is just beyond the pale.

Beyond the time/temperature problem, there are 3 things everyone needs to know about food safety:

• You cannot smell pathogens, just rancidity/spoilage. With spoilage, your food is definitely unsafe to eat, but it may be dangerous long before it smells "off."
• Cooking to ~165F/74C kills pathogenic bacteria. Different agencies and foods have slightly different temperatures, but most are at or below this temperature.
• Cooking will NOT destroy toxins bacteria produce, so heavy cooking is not a solution to meat left out too long. Staphylococcus aureus ("Staph"), chlostridium botulinum ("botulism"), Escheria coli ("E. coli"), and chlostridium perfringens all produce toxic chemicals, which are not destroyed by cooking.

If it was a very expensive steak, I'd be tempted to cut off the exterior and cook it heavily for myself only (would never dare serve to another). But, for a simple round steak? Bin it and buy another, it's not worth the risk.

You are really tempting fate. Unless your cold water was below 40f (which is doubtful), you have effectively replicated a bacteria culture for 7 hours. Since it's in an oxygen-free environment, your likely bug would be clostridium botulinum.

When your food's surface temperature rises above 40f, or drops below 130f, the safety clock starts ticking. Rule of thumb is four hours to consume. You are almost at double that time. Probably not good. Even though cooking in the crock pot will pasteurize your meat, it's not the pathogens that need to concern you (for the most part), but the toxins left behind.

You may be able to denature any toxins that have grown on your roast by searing ALL parts of the surface (good practice anyway), and then putting it into a preheated crock pot. But it's still pretty risky. So if it were me, I'd discard the beef and order a pizza.

Hmmm. How old was it to start with? Was it frozen? How cold was the water?

Obviously there isn't going to be anything living in it when you're done cooking it, but if its been warm long enough, you might still have enough dead bacteria/bacterial waste to make you a bit ill.

Myself, I'd eat it, but I'm not very cautious about such things.

Large chunks of frozen meat tend to take several hours to warm up to room temperature for cooking. I see no problem if:

• The meat has not been in a warm environment
• The meat looks fine
• The meat smells ok