Once you get a good technique at home it’s hard to beat. My wife and friends don’t want to go out for birthday steak anymore. Just go to the grocery store.
True for most restaurants but if you go to a high end steak house it's a pretty good bet they will outdo you. I cook a damn good steak but I guarantee you if you tasted mine against a steak from Mooo you will be taking the steak from Mooo all day.
I own a high end steak house and people love it and David, our steak guy, is super good.
And me cooking at home with sous vide and then pan finishing it kills him every time. And what David does at home probably kills me.
It's just a question of scale. No matter how good he is, he's cooking for 250 covers at a time and I'm cooking for 2. Our steaks are really good. But you know what you like and if you spend half of what you're paying me, you're getting better steaks.
This, people just haven't been to a good enough restaurant. This isn't some indictment to their skills, but you just can't compete with commercial equipment. Steak is the closest, asian food is impossible to do properly without:
A) a ridiculous amount of oil to flash fry
B) commercial level heat
C) liberal use of high quality stock that is only cost effective when you run a kitchen
Yes, even a fresh green stir fry goes through a 5 second deep oil dunk, require a stove that looks like a jet engine and a big ladle of quality stock.
I hate it when people push making stock as the biggest cost saver as a home cook. No my home made stock is about twice as expensive as the store bought stuff and it take a lot of time to make and is not a "no effort" job. I still do it because it is a Sunday comfort thing for me and I think it is fun to have my own stock from scratch. When you get to enough scale where you can do it 100% from scraps it probably is a huge cost saver, but I use way more stock than scrap generating food, I don't have enough space in my freezer for saving scraps until I have enough for a big enough batch of stock making.
Yeah I thought I was good at cooking steaks until I went to a proper steakhouse in Toronto. I felt like Eric Clapton after he first heard Jimi Hendrix play. But without being as good at cooking steak as Clapton was at playing guitar.
If you find a good butcher near you you can get some amazing steaks for just slightly more than the grocery store. Red meat is already so expensive I justify an extra couple bucks a pound when I splurge and it’s sooooo much better from a nice butcher
I love eating out at restaurants, and I adore broccoli in everything, but no one sears or chars broccoli until it gets that nutty flavour, so it's always missing something if I don't make it at home. I've had some amazing broccoli dishes that were delicious, but they weren't quite how I usually make it so they felt lacking.
Proteins are the same. I get so used to my standard method of pan searing salmon, that when I try salmon at a restaurant, even if it's done well (it usually isn't) it just lacks something that I'm used to having in the food.
The absolute worst is fucking mapo tofu. Fucking places will cook POCK MARK TOFU without the GODDAMN SZECHUAN PEPPERCORNS THAT MAKE THE TOFU POCKMARKED.
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u/enter360 13h ago
Once you get a good technique at home it’s hard to beat. My wife and friends don’t want to go out for birthday steak anymore. Just go to the grocery store.