Cooking guidelines for steak restaurants

The reason why you can't get a decent steak anywhere these days is simple.This is Great Britain.We put up with crap food & service & dare not complain when we are being ripped off for the privelage.If you want a decent steak & chips with all the sauce & trimmings for under a fiver then go to the continent.British food is the pits.Don't put up with it.COMPLAIN!

some are saying to continue cooking in he oven, but no one is mentioning the temperature to set the oven at.....

Season first then seal in the juices by searing the steak in a hot frying pan with olive oil,

then cook in the oven gas 6 as follows

For rare cook for 4 minutes

Med rare 8 minutes

Med 11 mins

Med - well - 14 mins

Well 18 mins.

This works for fillet steak 1.5 - 2 inches thick.

I think you are all idiots who dont appreciate what cooks do. a steak is cooked to a guideline (good common sense and good eyes) and the customer wants it cooking to his or her taste. Cooking a steak you can never win.
The better quality of the meat the more you pay bet you get better results.
The best steakeaters are the ones that stay to local produce and not imported sh1t like a cow that hasnt seen grass in all its life.

once you find somewhere, you will never look back.

sear your steak in a saucpan to seal it rest it and then finish in a oven before resting again.dolmio>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I'm going to have steak for lunch and I assure you it will be yummy. A nice piece of sirloin from the local butcher cooked rare. Yummy for my tummy!

I've just been informed by an Executive Chef that many factors will decide how one request for a medium will differ from another. Some reasons are as follows: size, age, whether the animal was injured or not and the length of time the piece/portion was left out of the fridge. Happy reading carnivores.

How can somebody see inside a steak? Order medium rare, and usually get a good steak.
If you want it barely pink, how do you expect anybody to be able to do that without cutting it
open? People that order medium seem to be the most picky. They want it both ways,
and expect a miracle.

Can I point out, that you're saying you can't get a decent steak "anywhere" these days, but that you've only ever eaten it in one pub! I guess the customer's always right eh?
You should vote with your feet and go somewhere else perhaps? And maybe not cast judgements on an entire industry on the basis of bad pub grub from one establishment.
Note the manic replies from chefs pointing out 80 hour weeks.
I worked as a cook for ten years, and if you go to a high-class establishment, with high turnover and experienced cooks who respect the product, you'll get what you're looking for almost every time.
Without trying to be mean, if you eat in crap places, ie: a pub, you'll get crap food.
Pretty simple.

Leave meat out of the fridge for over 10 Min's, are you nuts, that a nice way to kill off your customers you silly person. You will generally find that in all areas of the catering industry not all of them are bad and not all of them are goods, but they certainly are not all rubbish .

Try working behind an area which you would be for over 80 hours a week with heat from the front, back and the pressure of tickets constantly getting at you, and management telling you to push the tickets out without care of the food quality. This is the point where you get poor quality in foods, and the management will be the first to grab you by the nads and give you a roasting even though you had no choice of the matter because they were the first to tell you hours before.

If you have a good chef that cares for the quality and a good team behind him, you will have good food in a reasonable time with food presented to you in a reasonable manner, even fully qualified chefs from top colleges I have seen not being able to cope with the pressure because their heads are completely trained in the high quality take your time and not working 80 hours a week and in the conditions that the normal world works in, and with so many of them giving up.

I was trained by a great chef by the name of Stuart Dobson, he also showed me how to stay calm and show that in a way of not caring ..would actually produce you into giving more quality and stay calm in the process.

there are many other aspects you need to look at as well for poor food.

low running stock.... if you are busy and the stock is running low then your brain has to cope with the fact that you need to place different items than you are used to on the grill etc and remember how they are cooked, and that's not easy especially when you are asked half way through to change the order , then decide if you can use the items for something else.

also it is best to take the steak out of the fridge to mature for about half an hour too mature fogot to put comment on above e mail.

Cooking in pratice

Rare= Raw, straight out of the fridge. May be melted.
med. rare= Cooked over a candle for 15 seconds.
med. = The bacteria are still alive and crawling all over it.
med well = Leather, tanned and cured.
well done= A lump of charcoal.