What are you Baking the Week of August 28, 2022?

[Mike Nolan]

Kenji Lopez-Alt's book, The Food Lab, is a big heavy book, chock full of ideas, some of them rather controversial.

For example, he recommends against letting meat warm up to room temperature, because a 1" thick steak will take 4-5 hours to get to room temperature and that's too long in the danger zone.

His recommendation: Take it out of the fridge, season it, let it sit for a few minutes, then onto the grill.

I know professional chefs say they can tell how done a steak is by looking at and touching it, but I prefer to use my Thermapen. We like our steaks on the well-done side, about 158 degrees in the center. They're still plenty tender and juicy at that point.

A few seasons back on Hell's Kitchen one of the challenges was to cook 3 steaks, one medium-rare, one medium and one well-done and serve them at the same time. I want to try eating in one of Gordon Ramsay's steak restaurants once, to see if one of his professional chefs can do well-done meat that isn't cooked to death. I know I can do it.

Most steak places have something in the menu cautioning customers about ordering well-done meat. Based on what Gordon Ramsay has said, I think they're just being lazy.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks for the pie dough Mike.

My impression was that whole meat like steak could spend a little longer in the danger zone than ground meat. I know at Shake Shack they make the burgers in the morning and keep them by the grill in a refrigerator until they cook them. So they come from cold right to cooking.

I let steaks warm up some but I've never let it sit at room temp for four or five hours. And we would have advised customers against it at WF. We always offered to pack things in ice, too as did the cashiers and baggers.

I've seen several chefs say that a could chef can cook a steak to well done without leaving it burned to a cinder. I've never seen it done and my family likes medium rare so I aim for that (and I usually get medium).

[BakerAunt]

I use the technique in The Food Lab for cooking dried beans, and my beans come out perfectly now. That means salting the water in which they soak, draining it and rinsing the beans, then salting the water in which they cook. So, all those years of being told that salt should not be added to beans until they get soft was not accurate.

[Mike Nolan]

Last night I got the steaks out of the fridge at 5:30, salted and peppered them on both sides, then let them sit (covered) until they went on the grill shortly after 6PM. They were excellent. About 4 minutes on each side and they were at about 158 internal temperature, and still quite juicy.

More than one of the 'restaurant kitchen secrets' posts has said that chefs will take the worst piece of meat they have and cook it to death if a customer orders a well-done steak, that's why Gordon Ramsay's challenge was so interesting to me.

[Author]

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