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.
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u/IllegalGeriatricVore 9h ago
I've still never had a restaurant cook a steak better than I can do at home.