I understand the dismay. A filet has so little fat that cooking it well-done ruins the best thing it has going: its tenderness.
It’s like watching a rocker smash up his vintage Les Paul guitar. Sure it’s his guitar and he apparently enjoys trashing it but boy that was a waste of a nice guitar.
To take my ridiculous and extreme example further (The ass wiping with $100 bills), Would you not consider that a waste? Even if the owner liked wiping their ass with $100’s, would you REALLY agree that was the best use of that $100? Yeah, there’s nothing you can do about it but whine, and that’s what we’re doing. On the internet, no less.
A lot of replies are basically “what do you care how someone orders steak?”
The fact that those people should be burned at the stake as heretics aside, it’s just a matter of physically destroying the attractive properties of a filet. If you want to get a crispy steak just eat a London broil. It’s going to be tough anyway and much less expensive.
I never got this objection to food. Filet is squishy? Your mouth is always squirmy and squishy. It sounds like your gastronomic life is just hell on earth.
Is it wrong to put a filet in the crockpot for 8 hours while you’re at work with a cup of water?
It’s like I guy I knew who drank scotch and coke. Jesus weeps.
But not all cuts taste the same cooked well, particularly when considering texture as part of the taste. The filet is a very tender steak, and a well-done filet is going to be more tender than a well-done sirloin or ribeye. So while a well-done filet doesn’t appeal to you, for those who like their beef cooked that much there’s a perfectly good reason to choose the filet.
Note that I like my steaks medium rare to rare, but as someone who has some different tastes from most people (e.g. I can’t stand whipped cream or any kind of salad dressing) I resent folks who want to tell me what I should and shouldn’t like. Not everyone experiences all foods the same way.
It’s like being married to Sofia Vergara and then taking an oath to never have sex again.
Or buying a Lamborghini and never driving it above the speed limit.
Could you explain what you mean by “some people”? Usually a stereotype refers to a specific group of people.
Shit scotch/booze needs it.
But yeah, good/great scotch bourbon is a waste to mix it.
I cook fillet well done all the time. Not for myself, for my wife, that’s how she likes it. And that’s fine.
A well-done fillet is, as Gary T points out, still more tender than a well-done other cut.
But I never put coke in my single malt. Yech. That’s what ginger beer is for!
Funnily enough, grade inflation works the other way around here. If you order a steak to be cooked rare, you’ll likely get a medium steak. To get a steak that’s actually rare, you normally have to ask for one ‘on the blue side of rare.’
Same here. Unless I know the restaurant or it’s a well respected steakhouse, I generally have to order one grade of doneness below what I want to get what I want, especially with hamburgers. I’ve never gotten it happen the other way to me–the error always seems to be on the side of overcooking.
I, on the other hand, simply love all that.
I have no issue with people liking their meat well done if they done have a problem with me likely it merely warmed. Please, no comments about raw, and I’ll make no comments about charcoal briquets. To each their own, right?
When I cooked in a restaurant, I’d have orders for filet mignon butterflied Pittsburgh rare surprisingly often. Once had a filet ordered butterflied Pittsburgh very well done. We thought it was a joke, albeit an expensive one.
l well done filet mignon is still pink almost all the way through and it should still be a tasty tender cut. My girlfriend orders hers well done and I usually finish hers for her. I like mine blood rare but still enjoy her leftovers.
Warning Issued
Telling posters in the thread “Fuck you” is wildly inappropriate for a Cafe Society thread. You need to dial it back or stay out of the thread if you can’t participate according to the rules.
EVERYONE ELSE Let’s make sure to keep it civil- you can have strong feelings and disagree but let’s make sure we keep the conversation appropriate for this forum.
You make it sound like you have to take out a mortgage to buy one. Even someone on a budget can buy one in the supermarket and cook it themselves. Maybe not weekly but it’s not going to break the bank. You can get a decent filet at a chain like Texas Roadhouse for not too much money.
Most steak aficionados will not rank a filet mignon as one of the best. People like it because it is tender but the lack of fat means it’s not as flavorful as other cuts.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
We get more worked up here about non-traditional food preferences than we do about non-traditional sexual preferences. Which I guess is not all bad, but jeez . . .
We used to just nuke those kind of orders.