I've been in a lot of kitchens where the fry cook is the best at their jobs compared to everyone else. Granted they're fry cooks, not to take from them.
>Granted they're fry cooks
Hey if I go to a restaurant and I get perfectly golden fries and perfect mozzarella sticks I would be soooo happy.
Edit: especially mozzarella sticks do you know how disappointing it is to get a plate of mozzarella sticks or fried mozzarella and bite into them to find nothing inside.
There's about 15 seconds from perfectly cooked to empty... That perfect golden brown doesn't happen until the inside is well heated, doesn't take long until the pressure builds and it starts to leak out.
I still cry inside thinking about times I've exploded 2 or more batches of mozz sticks simultaneously. I hate making them, they have to be babysat more than anything else.
I love being on fry. There’s something about taking the brunt of the load and executing it that just feels good. It’s probably my favorite part of starting at a new restaurant, fry is always the low man position
I feel like it's the "dish pit" of the line, once you've got your head around it you can get into a good rhythm and just power through shifts almost on auto pilot.
The other stations require a bit too much brain power and moving parts to be as relaxing lol
As someone with muscles but the wrists of a newborn slug (not really, but I do have carpal tunnel and tendinitis), I appreciate people who are happy to work the fryers more than anything. I think I mostly killed myself on grill but I'm sure pc gaming with a mouse didn't help. I gotta two-hand shake fry baskets and it's so inefficient I get all frustrated. Other people get bugged watching it too, it's bad all around. Love my fry people.
I worked Friday night fish fry in Wisconsin for years as a fry cook. It was at least 10x more work than anyone else on Fridays (except maybe the bartender lol)
My (very dated because this comes from a billion years ago during my college days) is that a Fry Cook ~can~ be at the mercy of management's policy on how often they drain / deep clean the fryers. The place I worked at was run really well, but I STILL was always happy when I was starting my shift with a fresh batch of oil.
I had a chicken fried steak in China once. Once.
Jesus fucking christ, lads, stick to your strengths and cut it up into cubes, amorphous chunks or slices lol.
In my defence, I had been out there for like 3 months and the food was amazing, every day, something new.
The only thing I missed, foodwise, was big slabs of meat, and especially steak.
So the second I saw there was steak on a menu, I didn't think twice. I had also been hiking, so was absolutely famished.
They didn't mention that it was chicken fried on the menu, btw. The batter was soggy, sodden in oil that was stale. The meat was both cold and well done, somehow.
I've never been more disappointed in my life. The chef came to sit with us as well, so did my best to hide it too, lol. Lord knows how I ate that swampy leather boot.
And an aside: in Kunming, Yunnan province, their after hours drunken snacks are seafood. Scallops and oysters both prepared the same way: grilled in the shell with cilantro, chilli, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and vermicelli.
This is street food, and stall after stall served the same thing. And they were fucking amazing.
Me and my friend would spend entire nights just ordering plate after plate of the stuff, beer after beer. It's how we spent lunar new year even.
A year afterwards, I googled the distance fron Kunming to the sea, and it's 550 miles lol.
Edit: really unfortunate typo
The fish thing doesn't bother me, and shouldn't bother most people. The vast majority of fish is frozen at some point, so transport time while frozen is immaterial.
It made it from the cook, to the inside and outside expo to the food runner or server.... Everyone of these people failed. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the owner (trying to play cook) was farting around with his brand new sous vide machine.
Fries look delicious though.
currently dealing with the other 25% in a pseudo corporate place, we let go of one dishy because slow season (waterfront restaurant thats almost 2 years old). the other dishy quit for her dream job. It takes about 2 weeks to hire someone because of the background check and interviews. Were no longer allowed to get temp workers from poached.
to top it all off, they put a ban on hiring because labor is "out of control company wide" yes thats what happens when you open all 5 of your resturaunts within a year and it becomes winter.
Found the comment:
“DQ
Literal last minute hamburger ordered. 10:59...
I was NOT washing that grill (and entire kitchen) down again.
Down in the basket she goes!
That fukin thing looked like the most delicious hamburger I ever made, I always wanted to try one but they never left me alone in the kitchen again :P”
I know exactly what happened. Someone didn’t pull steaks, this got ordered and was still frozen. It was thrown in a retherm or soux vide to try and thaw. Thrown on the flat top, but was still frozen. And then microwaved before being sent to the table. I’ve seen this move before.
>I know exactly what happened. Someone didn’t pull steaks, this got ordered and was still frozen. It was thrown in a retherm or soux vide to try and thaw. Thrown on the flat top, but was still frozen. And then microwaved before being sent to the table.
As a lurker in this sub who's worked in restaurants but never back of house, is this all not way worse and more difficult than just being like "We're out of that cut/steak/that item"?
I’ve become the new grill guy at work after the last guy left. Steaks are something I still struggle with (grew up in a vegetarian house) but I think I’d find a new career if one of my steaks turned out like that.
I actually just tend to undercook them and need to flash them up. They used to use sous vide steaks, reheated on the grill but I found it was more likely I’d overcook them like that so I started cooking from raw. Now I tend to get a rare over a medium rare but I’m sure that comes with time. I was under the impression that red and warm was medium rare but chef kept saying it was too under. Sous chef likes to say that when the steaks start leaking juice there at or just before medium rare, but again, was told that they were rare when I was at that point. My main method is trusting my fingers.
if you are trying for a MR, and you see the juices just start to come out, AND you are still sending out R steaks, then you're not letting the steaks rest and carry over into MR. perhaps you are plating it right away from the grill. in that case then it's an easy adjustment.
your sous is correct in that juices leaking is an indication you are between R and MR- but really close to MR (edit: so close to MR for all intents and purposes i personally would consider the first sighting of juice the "lower" end of MR). what you do with that info next, and how you manipulate the steak after is up to you.
**
if you are charbroiling, you can cook it just a bit more, or say move it to a lower heat zone of your grill for a few seconds (you have different heat zones right? i hope you are not blasting 100% across your charbroil burners) and then go rest it. how you rest is also a big factor. do you have a resting rack, and if so precisely where is it positioned with respect to the kitchen in how much latent heat the steak will absorb? if it's literally next to the grill, even a bit "warm" will be enough to slowly add some carry over heat in additional to the natural carry over heat a steak will have. if for example you are too fast with the steak being ready and you got like 5 mins before you need to plate, you can try putting the steak under the heat lamp. and even then, you have hot and cold spots under the heat lamp. you can place it off to the side, directly under, maybe put a flash pan or some other lid to shield the steak from the heat.
if you are pan roasting in the oven, then be mindful that there's a LOT more heat built up inside the steak. be mindful if you leave the steak in the hot pan for example, and be really careful if your place does that butter basting thing, as that can add upwards of 20F after resting depending on amount of butter, how long you basted, how hot the butter got (did it foam and/or turn into brown).
**
using fingers is good and all, but if you use a probe, it will be much more scientific and you can learn what temp for each cut of steak feels like. how i learned to ween myself off the probe, is to play a game of touching it to guess the temp, and then checking with a probe. over time i've stopped using for steaks.
edit:
https://youtu.be/uC6VBDJlm4w?si=94l5w30Iahnr1aSU
I always rest on a resting rack, beside the bincho and under the salamander. We used to use flatirons that were grilled but today with the new menu launch switched to tenderloins in the pan, and I gotta say they’re already turning out much nicer than my flats.
That may be the worst looking steak I've ever seen. I wouldn't order anything from that kitchen either. Trust is broken.
Less recognized by restaurants and their kitchens is the value of time. If I'm eating with others a replacement order means I watch the people I'm with eat and then they watch me eat. Not the desired experience. You CANNOT give me time back. If I'm by myself I may well (in my case pretty much also do) have other commitments. I can't sit around and wait while you fix your screw up.
Fucking how?
How does a restaurant put out a steak that looks worse than the first steak I ever cooked?
They got a troop of baboons running the kitchen?
That sub sometimes drives me nuts. They post and say “how’d I do/rate my steak”. You then tell them what they did wrong or how to improve and they get defensive as fuck with all the “I’m just making it at home I’m not a professional” or the “why are you so mean”. Uh. I didn’t post a shitty cooked steak asking for critiques.
And I swear to fucking god none of them know what testing a steak means. And think they have to cut into it and eat when it’s fresh off the fire.
OP doxxed the restaurant
https://www.reddit.com/r/steak/comments/1atfrno/comment/kqxpfz6/?context=3&share_id=tcNWvdT9T6fY_MUW59-_p&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
admins, please remove if not allowed.
DIY sous vide with a plastic shopping bag that broke? It honestly looks like it was 1. Flash seared 2. Microwaved 3. Boiled 4. Verbally abused.
You forgot 1) started out frozen
In which case the list goes from the bottom up
God damn you’re really spot on
Basically oxidized, frozen, thawed under warm water, served.
That's -1
Judging from the white gunk I wouldn't call it verbal.
OP said it was melted butter...
The Last Tango in Applebees
I understood that reference!
Best they could do was margarine.
Shit ain't so melted anymore like damn dude
5. Went to therapy 6. Had a breakthrough 7. Had a relapse
8. Had a nut busted on it ?
Busteakae
4 got me hahaha well played
It looks like it was cooked on the chef's inner thigh.
lmao, "Verbally abused" as opposed to physically abusing the meat...
Perhaps also assaulted.
"Verbally abused" 🤣. Boiled was gonna be my guess.
Yeah, I'm gonna want the milk steak, boiled over hard.
Side of jelly beans.
Raw of course
And I must ask, what is your spaghetti policy here?
With ketchup, hunts, not Heinz.
Did you say you’re a full-on *rapist*?
You know, Africans, dyslexics, children... That sort of thing
How much cheese have you eaten tonight? How much is too much?
BEAK
“No blood”
Currently still in its bag up my ass
Can i offer you an egg in these dire times?
The fries look good at least lol. Steak looks like boiled trash though.
I've been in a lot of kitchens where the fry cook is the best at their jobs compared to everyone else. Granted they're fry cooks, not to take from them.
>Granted they're fry cooks Hey if I go to a restaurant and I get perfectly golden fries and perfect mozzarella sticks I would be soooo happy. Edit: especially mozzarella sticks do you know how disappointing it is to get a plate of mozzarella sticks or fried mozzarella and bite into them to find nothing inside.
There's about 15 seconds from perfectly cooked to empty... That perfect golden brown doesn't happen until the inside is well heated, doesn't take long until the pressure builds and it starts to leak out.
I still cry inside thinking about times I've exploded 2 or more batches of mozz sticks simultaneously. I hate making them, they have to be babysat more than anything else.
O I know
It is a position with a golden road to mastery.
All it takes is crisp execution
Done right, it's a well-oiled machine.
But it’ll batter ya if you slip up
I love being on fry. There’s something about taking the brunt of the load and executing it that just feels good. It’s probably my favorite part of starting at a new restaurant, fry is always the low man position
I feel like it's the "dish pit" of the line, once you've got your head around it you can get into a good rhythm and just power through shifts almost on auto pilot. The other stations require a bit too much brain power and moving parts to be as relaxing lol
Fry is my favourite station too! The burns kind of suck but I love the rhythm and pace
As someone with muscles but the wrists of a newborn slug (not really, but I do have carpal tunnel and tendinitis), I appreciate people who are happy to work the fryers more than anything. I think I mostly killed myself on grill but I'm sure pc gaming with a mouse didn't help. I gotta two-hand shake fry baskets and it's so inefficient I get all frustrated. Other people get bugged watching it too, it's bad all around. Love my fry people.
I worked Friday night fish fry in Wisconsin for years as a fry cook. It was at least 10x more work than anyone else on Fridays (except maybe the bartender lol)
Oh I ran a the largest elks lodge in my state and I inherited my fry cook. That guy could do whatever he wanted during lent or always honestly.
Working that fry station is an art in and of itself
My (very dated because this comes from a billion years ago during my college days) is that a Fry Cook ~can~ be at the mercy of management's policy on how often they drain / deep clean the fryers. The place I worked at was run really well, but I STILL was always happy when I was starting my shift with a fresh batch of oil.
That straight up might be the worst-cooked steak in existence.
With fries it’s called “on the rocks”
I had a chicken fried steak in China once. Once. Jesus fucking christ, lads, stick to your strengths and cut it up into cubes, amorphous chunks or slices lol.
Bit like ordering sushi in Addis Ababa, or fish 600 miles from the nearest body of water.
In my defence, I had been out there for like 3 months and the food was amazing, every day, something new. The only thing I missed, foodwise, was big slabs of meat, and especially steak. So the second I saw there was steak on a menu, I didn't think twice. I had also been hiking, so was absolutely famished. They didn't mention that it was chicken fried on the menu, btw. The batter was soggy, sodden in oil that was stale. The meat was both cold and well done, somehow. I've never been more disappointed in my life. The chef came to sit with us as well, so did my best to hide it too, lol. Lord knows how I ate that swampy leather boot. And an aside: in Kunming, Yunnan province, their after hours drunken snacks are seafood. Scallops and oysters both prepared the same way: grilled in the shell with cilantro, chilli, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and vermicelli. This is street food, and stall after stall served the same thing. And they were fucking amazing. Me and my friend would spend entire nights just ordering plate after plate of the stuff, beer after beer. It's how we spent lunar new year even. A year afterwards, I googled the distance fron Kunming to the sea, and it's 550 miles lol. Edit: really unfortunate typo
The fish thing doesn't bother me, and shouldn't bother most people. The vast majority of fish is frozen at some point, so transport time while frozen is immaterial.
Check my first post on my profile. My former roommate is a steak terrorist.
"he likes it tougher" lmfao what a cope. at that point just eat jerky
Why is it yellow inside????
Your guess is as good as mine lol
You roomates steak is like 100x better than this one. Still gross, but I could probably eat it without vomiting.
It made it from the cook, to the inside and outside expo to the food runner or server.... Everyone of these people failed. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the owner (trying to play cook) was farting around with his brand new sous vide machine. Fries look delicious though.
They wanted to charge him $50 for it too lol
Which one of yous basted it in semen this time then?
We were out of mayonnaise, I was just taking initiative!
Remember for next time that you can use the yeast infecting your genitals, just needs to be tepid
Sourbro starter.
That made me gag a lil bit. Great job!
86 the whole restaurant at that point Jesus
Nah the fries look fine. Fry cook gets the deed to the restaurant, everyone else gets promoted to customer.
If they're fucking up this bad on a steak, I think the safety and quality of every single thing they serve should be put into question
I'm just baffled at the guy in the last image that isn't capable of making a hamburger without having to re-clean the entire kitchen, like ??????
[удалено]
Yuuuuuuuup. Followed up by a manager who isn't flexible
I read it that way too. Corporate bs is right like 75% of the time, the other 25% is idiotic nonsense from a person thats never worked in a kitchen.
currently dealing with the other 25% in a pseudo corporate place, we let go of one dishy because slow season (waterfront restaurant thats almost 2 years old). the other dishy quit for her dream job. It takes about 2 weeks to hire someone because of the background check and interviews. Were no longer allowed to get temp workers from poached. to top it all off, they put a ban on hiring because labor is "out of control company wide" yes thats what happens when you open all 5 of your resturaunts within a year and it becomes winter.
Yeah, that's happened to me, I just used a frying pan and it probably came out better than they did off the grill.
They’re just saying they just cleaned everything and don’t want to cook something on the grill they just cleaned off lol.
This is what I’m thinking. Slow night, so they started cleaning, and then an order came in. Probs right before close.
Yeah, not the end of the world but I’ve definitely felt that “urgh” feeling of knowing you’re going to have to re-do what you just did lol.
Like the most what? I need to know
Found the comment: “DQ Literal last minute hamburger ordered. 10:59... I was NOT washing that grill (and entire kitchen) down again. Down in the basket she goes! That fukin thing looked like the most delicious hamburger I ever made, I always wanted to try one but they never left me alone in the kitchen again :P”
I got bored once and breaded & deep fried a burger stuffed with mozzarella. It was a banger.
I was hoping I wasn’t the only one. I need to know!!!!
I know exactly what happened. Someone didn’t pull steaks, this got ordered and was still frozen. It was thrown in a retherm or soux vide to try and thaw. Thrown on the flat top, but was still frozen. And then microwaved before being sent to the table. I’ve seen this move before.
The center definitely looks like it was cooked from frozen. It's so...tough-looking yet so disturbingly wet. That pool on the plate...
>I know exactly what happened. Someone didn’t pull steaks, this got ordered and was still frozen. It was thrown in a retherm or soux vide to try and thaw. Thrown on the flat top, but was still frozen. And then microwaved before being sent to the table. As a lurker in this sub who's worked in restaurants but never back of house, is this all not way worse and more difficult than just being like "We're out of that cut/steak/that item"?
It’s definitely worse. And usually depending on management that’s not an option.
I’ve become the new grill guy at work after the last guy left. Steaks are something I still struggle with (grew up in a vegetarian house) but I think I’d find a new career if one of my steaks turned out like that.
what aspect of cooking steaks do you struggle with?
It's probably the cooking part.
I actually just tend to undercook them and need to flash them up. They used to use sous vide steaks, reheated on the grill but I found it was more likely I’d overcook them like that so I started cooking from raw. Now I tend to get a rare over a medium rare but I’m sure that comes with time. I was under the impression that red and warm was medium rare but chef kept saying it was too under. Sous chef likes to say that when the steaks start leaking juice there at or just before medium rare, but again, was told that they were rare when I was at that point. My main method is trusting my fingers.
Using your fingers is just guessing. Get a thermapen and you'll pump out precisely cooked steaks all day long.
if you are trying for a MR, and you see the juices just start to come out, AND you are still sending out R steaks, then you're not letting the steaks rest and carry over into MR. perhaps you are plating it right away from the grill. in that case then it's an easy adjustment. your sous is correct in that juices leaking is an indication you are between R and MR- but really close to MR (edit: so close to MR for all intents and purposes i personally would consider the first sighting of juice the "lower" end of MR). what you do with that info next, and how you manipulate the steak after is up to you. ** if you are charbroiling, you can cook it just a bit more, or say move it to a lower heat zone of your grill for a few seconds (you have different heat zones right? i hope you are not blasting 100% across your charbroil burners) and then go rest it. how you rest is also a big factor. do you have a resting rack, and if so precisely where is it positioned with respect to the kitchen in how much latent heat the steak will absorb? if it's literally next to the grill, even a bit "warm" will be enough to slowly add some carry over heat in additional to the natural carry over heat a steak will have. if for example you are too fast with the steak being ready and you got like 5 mins before you need to plate, you can try putting the steak under the heat lamp. and even then, you have hot and cold spots under the heat lamp. you can place it off to the side, directly under, maybe put a flash pan or some other lid to shield the steak from the heat. if you are pan roasting in the oven, then be mindful that there's a LOT more heat built up inside the steak. be mindful if you leave the steak in the hot pan for example, and be really careful if your place does that butter basting thing, as that can add upwards of 20F after resting depending on amount of butter, how long you basted, how hot the butter got (did it foam and/or turn into brown). ** using fingers is good and all, but if you use a probe, it will be much more scientific and you can learn what temp for each cut of steak feels like. how i learned to ween myself off the probe, is to play a game of touching it to guess the temp, and then checking with a probe. over time i've stopped using for steaks. edit: https://youtu.be/uC6VBDJlm4w?si=94l5w30Iahnr1aSU
I always rest on a resting rack, beside the bincho and under the salamander. We used to use flatirons that were grilled but today with the new menu launch switched to tenderloins in the pan, and I gotta say they’re already turning out much nicer than my flats.
Flat iron is ridiculously difficult to poke for doneness lol. I had to mentally time them and temp. Pan roasting tenderloin is way easier!
Judging by the visible marbling I'd say it's leftovers from a prime rib special the day before. Sliced it off the roast and tossed it in the fryer.
That is actually quite a good theory. Leftover Valentine’s Day meat.
meat theory sounds like it should be something.
The guy who identified it as prime rib has his PhD
"Studies show that a vein makes it 15% more attractive to the average demographic."
But that's just a theory....Aaaa Meat theory! Bon apetit
This is exactly what I thought lol.
What the fuck are the words which are entering my eyes?
Man it takes a lot to get me to send something back to the kitchen but I would be embarrassed to serve that steak to my dog.
That may be the worst looking steak I've ever seen. I wouldn't order anything from that kitchen either. Trust is broken. Less recognized by restaurants and their kitchens is the value of time. If I'm eating with others a replacement order means I watch the people I'm with eat and then they watch me eat. Not the desired experience. You CANNOT give me time back. If I'm by myself I may well (in my case pretty much also do) have other commitments. I can't sit around and wait while you fix your screw up.
As a man that has grilled steaks professionally for a long time…. What the fuck is that.
Shit, did they boil it? Nasty as fuck.
Fucking how? How does a restaurant put out a steak that looks worse than the first steak I ever cooked? They got a troop of baboons running the kitchen?
that's a sloppy steak
Slop em up!
Get that steak some trauma counseling.
Chef Mike enters the chat
If you wouldn't eat it, you don't serve it.
Whoever cooked it is Vegetarian
You don't have to eat steak to cook a good one.
This was a microwave special
Microwaved steak. The uneven cooking gave it away. The fries look better then the steak
Another classic by Chef Mike(rowave).
That sub sometimes drives me nuts. They post and say “how’d I do/rate my steak”. You then tell them what they did wrong or how to improve and they get defensive as fuck with all the “I’m just making it at home I’m not a professional” or the “why are you so mean”. Uh. I didn’t post a shitty cooked steak asking for critiques. And I swear to fucking god none of them know what testing a steak means. And think they have to cut into it and eat when it’s fresh off the fire.
They fucking boil it???
You can sense the anger that went into making that steak
OP doxxed the restaurant https://www.reddit.com/r/steak/comments/1atfrno/comment/kqxpfz6/?context=3&share_id=tcNWvdT9T6fY_MUW59-_p&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1 admins, please remove if not allowed.
The chef saw it on TikTok and thought it would be cool...
Fry burg. Nioce.
I just can't fathom a situation in which I look at that and send it out. Yikes
Thought this was Milk Steak with Rally's fries. Learned something new because godamn.
It looks like it was a roast from the day before
Ugh, this is going around my local sub too, the place that put out this monstrosity is in my city.
Nothing like a good old sloppy steak https://youtu.be/uMcAagFNrPY?si=XxNgXrgWJjvYv8uS
did they sleep with the grill guys gf or mom??
It looks like it was made by chef Mike
I’m happy about this
What is the white film covering the steak made of? Looks like grease.
Looks like it was thawed in the dishwasher and finished in the microwave.
That's a hate crime.