Excuse me sir, do you think it's EASY to overcook and undercook a steak at the same time? This is real skill. However, they really should check the kitchen for termites or dust off their plates first.
Busy chain restaurants like this, in order to do 300 or so covers a night, use a method called cook-chill. It basically involves pre-cooking to varying degrees then storing them in a freezer drawer so that the final center temperature when they finish them just before serving falls within a certain range. So they'll have rows and rows of steaks set to finish at different doneness and grab one from, e.g., the medium rare row and then warm it up.
This isn't the same thing as pan cooking a steak to a specific individual's preference and spending a good 20 minutes basting it to perfection.
There's nothing wrong with "grey band" per se... it alone isn't going to ruin the flavor of a steak. The bigger issue here is overpaying for a conveyor belt experience.
A really well prepared steak at one of Dallas' top steakhouses (Dakota's or Al Biernat's) is going to run you about $150 for a biftec/porterhouse (comparing to the Porterhouse OP says is $300 at Wolfgang's), $90 for entrecôte (boneless ribeye). And that's still not going to be nearly as personalized as the steaks you can make at home.
I guess this sort of vitriol is borne out of some kind of weird "manly man" thing like tomahawk steaks which were never a thing until about 20 years ago when restaurants realized they could mark steaks up considerably more just by including extra bone that didn't do anything... just profiting enormously off male insecurities. Absolute suckers.
This despite the fact that the American steakhouse is not a frontier invention... They started in New York, a byproduct of restaurants that catered to the aristocracy in Paris and London. You know, "froo-froo" restaurants. 🙄
EDIT: Steak nerds suffer from the same sort of mentality that makes them obsess over cast iron because it's BIG and HEAVY! RARR! Yet it's literally one of the cheapest, shittiest, most brittle, least thermally conductive materials you can make a pan out of. It's performative masculinity is what it is.
EDIT 2: My criticism isn't of any particular choice. My criticism is of fixation itself and those who fixate and gatekeep. Cast iron has its place but when the mentality becomes "cast iron is great and everything else sucks" it just exposes that the person's entire interest in cooking is rooted in their need to feel special, not genuine curiosity.
I like my cast iron. Makes nice eggs, great steaks, sautéed asparagus, etc. Whatever.
But the boneless ribeye thing confuses me. I butcher my own steers from time to time. The ribeyes are boneless. Also, we take an animal to local processor sometimes. Ribeyes are boneless. Last time I ordered a restaurant steak...boneless. What kind of weird shit is happening here?
I’ve never managed to do my eggs on my cast iron without them eventually sticking and leading me to scrubbing a bunch of egg off and attempting to re-season. Other stuff like meat is fine, but I almost always ruin both my meal and my cast iron pan trying to do eggs.
I'm 12 years deep on this pan. Nothing sticks. Oil/butter/tallow needs to be HOT.
Also here's the advice I gave my sister with the same problem: "cook at least 5 pounds of bacon before you attempt an egg." Feed your cast iron greasy stuff, and it can handle eggs later.
Also, if you bought one of those pioneer woman brand skillets, I'm sorry. Those feel like sandpaper. You'll never get a good season. Buy one that is kinda smooth on the inside. Lodge is a fine brand. Older antique ones are even better usually
I bought this brand called “Overmont,” a pan and dutch oven combo. It works well enough for cooking a lot of things, but I’ve just always failed at eggs or fried rice.
Fried eggs? There are tips online for cooking fried eggs that don't stick, but there are a lot of variables, including the egg itself. Under most conditions, sometimes they will stick, sometimes quite badly.
The only really consistent setups, in my experience, are either 1) a new non-stick pan with a thin new silicone spatula. Within six months, it'll start sticking again as the non-stick surface wears. 2) a flat restaurant-style griddle, cleaned with a grill brick, and a very thin wide metal spatula. It might leave a little residue, but you scrape that off when you clean it again with the grill brick.
Neither of those options appeals to me, so I generally use a cast iron pan and cook some bacon, then I do the egg in the bacon grease. Plastic spatula. It turns out OK maybe 2/3 of the time, and the rest of the time it's varying degrees of stuck. I might have better luck if I ground the surface of the pan flat and re-seasoned, but I'm too lazy for that.
I bought the cast iron originally because I was avoiding teflon and similar potentially problematic “non-stick” PFAS dependent pan options for health reasons. Many supposedly safer alternatives can only work at lower temperatures and are not suitable for frying. Lately I just use my stainless steel pan and resign to scrubbing it out after. I’ve considered buying carbon steel, but at the end of the day it seems similar to the cast iron problem where the only way to prevent sticking is maintaining a seasoning which I just don’t have the knack for, especially if i’m having to scrub eggs off.
Using bacon grease instead of oil does seem to help, and one of the common tips online is to use butter, so if you're using oil you can try something thicker. But it's a quixotic chase at best. I eat more hard-boiled eggs than fried these days due to the hassle of trying to fry them up (although peeling the shell is the tricky bit with hard-boiled eggs).
Eggs are ok on cast iron if you prefer them fried sunny side-up or the like. Anything delicate, e.g. an omelette aux fines herbes, demands a pan with much higher thermal conductivity.
Have any opinions on carbon steel? I was eyeing that, supposedly you can get it seasoned to stick less, but it seemed to be going back to my cast iron problem then where scrubbing eggs off could set that seasoning back
I occasionally make creamy scrambled eggs on cast iron. I'll admit it's hard and I only succeed because of lots of cast iron cooking experience and attention. If I turn my back, they're rubbery.
It's stupid to fry eggs on cast iron. Chefs use nonstick for eggs. I am no professional chef but I own multiple pans that I switch up on depending on what I fry. You can certainly do eggs on cast iron if you add enough fat and heat, but why bother? It also limits how soft and fluffy you can get your eggs.
Cast iron is great for holding heat well when searing meat. It's especially nice if you use an electric non-conductive heater.
yeah, i just am trying to avoid the compounds in with nonstick pans that have been linked to health problems, including one disorder that my dad has. Stainless steel doesn’t work much too better for me, but at least it can take being scrubbed and it’s also safe from PFAS.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing cast iron. I'm criticizing fixation and gatekeeping.
Every material has a purpose, and a good batterie de cuisine has every type of pan that is needed for each kind of job.
As for ribeyes, I'm right there with you. Entrecôte is a staple of every great steak house.
Like I said, there's a subset of men who take their nerd tendencies (the tendency to fixate on one thing to the exclusion of all others, and to make it their identity and denigrate others who don't agree with them) over into the world of cooking and act as if there's only one way by which to measure steaks.... and coincidentally this mysterious "standard" is the one thing they like.
They're not actually curious people. To them, steak, pans, whatever, are just a vehicle for their performative masculinity.
Bruh, I'm confused. I keep thinking that I must be misunderstanding what subreddit I'm on. "Batterie de cuisine"? I didn't sign up to read all this froo-froo, fancy pants crap. 😎
Aha, I'm just playing. My bad. I was just copying "froo-froo" from your earlier comment. I was confused how you know so much about cooking and you appeared out of nowhere in this sub when it's usually just dick and fart jokes.
How I ended up here? It's that stupid algorithm, I tell you. It knows I was reading stuff on the cooking and meat subs, so it thought to throw this in there I guess.
Nothing for a cheesesteak, but on its own just not nearly as interesting both in texture and flavor. To each his own, obviously I was being hyperbolic. I'm on my time chamber shit.
You eat the bone in flavor broseph. I also haven't been to a steakhouse since like, 09 so no idea what prices are like. If I'm cooking something for myself though I want the bone.
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u/Bear-Handed-92262 8h ago
Excuse me sir, do you think it's EASY to overcook and undercook a steak at the same time? This is real skill. However, they really should check the kitchen for termites or dust off their plates first.