Some recipes seem to require a lot of seasoning, even though you don’t necessarily taste it in the final dish. And pepper is cheap and generally universally liked/tolerated, so it tends to be used a lot.
Mister Rik, I can confirm Applebee’s as a purveyor of overpriced, warmed-up TV dinners. For my purposes, though, it’s actually pretty good because their under 550-calorie menu has appropriate portion sizes.
That being said, there is one and only one locally-owned place I’ve ever been to that refused to accommodate a special request; the server told me in very careful and measured words that their chef took great pains to develop each recipe, and making substitutions would cheapen my experience, and they couldn’t do that. The establishment, BTW, was a diner that went out of business fairly quickly partly because of this autocratic approach to customer service. (That, and their food just wasn’t good. Their chef needed more talent and less pain.)
Someone upthread mentioned individual servings of peanut butter. When I read this, I went :smack: and dug around in my kitchen. My purse now contains a ziploc bag with a container of peanut butter, 3 graham crackers (in a plastic box so they don’t get crushed) and a plastic knife. Thanks! I think this will work.
I live in Texas. The state bird is the mocking bird, the state flower is the bluebonnet, the state reptile is the horny toad (actually, its formal name is the horned lizard, but everyone calls them horny toads), and our state seasoning seems to be pepper. And our state religion is football. Most non Hispanic people in Texas are partial to what is called “home cooking”, which means, basically, fried in lard and heavy on the pepper. Hispanics won’t necessarily use a lot of black pepper, but they WILL use a lot of other hot peppers. So if I avoid the salsa and pico de gallo, and choose carefully, I can usually eat at Mexican/TexMex restaurants without a problem.
Yeah, this has been my experience. Many, many chains around here have preseasoned, precooked food. This means that the individual restaurants don’t have to worry about hiring skilled cooks who know how to season things…they can hire just about anyone who can work a microwave and plate food. And the food is going to taste about the same in one restaurant in a chain as the next, unless the chain decides to have a “Texas edition” of a food or sauce. Preseasoning the food means that the chain can control costs and tastes across the chain.
What’s more, some chains don’t even have separate salt and pepper shakers in the kitchen. They have one shaker filled with a mix of salt and pepper, and they shake this over everything.
Not only is pepper cheap, but it will help liven up mediocre food and cooking. So if you’ve got bland beef (because it came from dairy cattle, rather than meat cattle), pepper up those steaks and burgers!
I’ve been to a few places where the tables don’t have salt or pepper shakers on them. The chef has ALREADY seasoned the food perfectly, you must understand this, and if you want salt or pepper, yes, they’ll bring the shakers to your table…but you WILL understand (without actually being told) that you are RUINING a WORK OF ART.
Back in the 60s, when my father was trying to get us kids to use a little less salt, he explained that people used to salt and pepper their food to cure it, and to cover up the “off” taste of older food, and that people got used to really heavily salted foods. He’d talk about sausages and ham and salted fish and corned beef.
And, as doctors kept harping on the link between sodium intake and health, gradually people started putting less salt in foods.
I understand that at a lot of chains, like Applebee’s, most of the food is already prepared, but I was under the impression that the chains got plain chicken and sauces separately. The sauces were pre-made and either frozen or in powdered form…not that dishes came completely pre-made, like TV dinners.
That way they can prepare the chicken several different ways, including plain if requested. The claims were that every dish at every restaurant is just drenched in pepper, and I’ve never seen it.
Maybe some chains DO get plain chicken pieces. However, I’ve asked at a few chains, and they all have preseasoned chicken and steak pieces. This means that the chicken for a Cobb salad, and chicken fajitas, and the chicken for a grilled breast of chicken comes from the same container, in those places.
Again, it’s about outsourcing labor. These places don’t hire cooks, they hire people who can heat food up and plate it, quickly.
You’d think they’d be able to prepare it several different ways, but I tried to order a cheese steak at Denny’s and they said they wouldn’t be able to hold the mushrooms.
Come on, we both know that Denny’s gets their food pre packaged. But they should at least try to pretend it’s not!
Even at non-chain restaurants, the early food prep, such as seasoning the meat, may take place in large batches early in the day. Honestly, it would not even occur to me to try to order something in a restaurant without salt or pepper, for this reason. Holding the mushrooms or the cheese or whatever, sure. But not basic seasoning.
Yes, a lot of chains get their food pre-made, but as you’ve also said, you’ve been to high dollar restaurants, in the same area. You live in Fort Worth, Texas, not Ardmore, OK. (My in-laws live in OK and my father-in-law is from Fort Worth, so I have a fair amount of experience with the region.) You live in one of the biggest cities in the state. The airport is DFW- Dallas/Fort Worth, so we’re not talking about limiting options here. It puzzles me that you seem to have such a hard time finding a restaurant that will cater to your request(s).
As for pepper being used to liven up bland beef, in my experience, being in north Texas (Sherman- an hour and a half from FW) and south Oklahoma (Durant, Madill, etc.), it was the BBQ sauces I couldn’t avoid. Yes, these present other health problems (full of sugar), but to the issue of more pepper than sauce? Maybe I’ve just been to the wrong restaurants.
Unless you’re sensitive to pepper, you probably don’t notice the pepper that’s in a lot of foods. Just about all BBQ has pepper in the rub or the sauce or both. I mean, let’s take chicken fried steak, which is pretty much a staple here. The breading will have pepper (and salt) in it, and the cream gravy is going to have a lot of pepper in it, preferably freshly ground. Or take mashed potatoes…you’d think that this would be a bland, safe food if there’s no gravy on it, but many places put either black or white pepper in the potatoes as they are made.
As for the high dollar restaurants, in those places, the chef knows (or thinks he knows) exactly how much salt and pepper and other seasonings to put on the food…and the food WILL be prepped ahead of time, and part of the prepping is the seasoning. They don’t have unseasoned steaks or lamb chops lying around. I’ve asked about this in three places (Bonnell’s, Ruffino’s, and the lamented Covey). The idea is that the diner will find the dish perfectly seasoned already, and won’t need to add salt or pepper.
And Og help you if you ask for ketchup. Not that I WOULD, you know, but it’s bad enough if I ask for salt.
My suggestion then would be to scrap the chains and the high end places and find a good Mom-and-Pop restaurant that doesn’t conform to the demands of a head office looking for cheap uniformity, or a chef that won’t cater to a customer who’s paying top dollar (??). Working in several kitchens that didn’t have a logo over the front door, I only ever remember the frozen shit meant for the deep fryer to come pre-seasoned. Not the ground beef we made into burgers (salt yes, pepper, no). Not the liver for the liver and onions. Not the chicken Cordon Bleu nor the Kiev. The rib eye did come with pepper, but it was added as the meat was cooking, so if you didn’t want it, you just had to ask. I guess it was assumed that if there were salt and pepper shakers on the table, you seasoned it to your own liking, not the cook’s. These places aren’t hard to find, particularly in larger populated areas.
Mostly I DO eat at the Mom and Pop places, and that’s precisely why I eat at those places. The price is generally a little lower, and the service is a little better, and Mom or Papi is delighted to see me.
Today, we were at a mom and pop place and because I wanted to find out how it would play out…I asked that my food be made with no pepper. The first plate came out with lots of pepper. I could see it. Now, I do like pepper and have no problems eating it, but one of the guys saw it and sent my plate back. The second plate came out with pepper as well. I ate that because I could and didn’t want to piss off the cook.
The waitress asked about it and I told her that it was an experiment to see if I could get food cooked how I wanted it. She comped my meal and said many sorries. I tipped her the cost of my meal and my usual 3 dollar tip.
I wonder if the cooks out here don’t speak enough english to understand special requests.
Interesting experiment, flatlined. I also wonder if there was possibly any confusion with black pepper vs. bell peppers? Like maybe they thought, “This crazy dude asked for no peppers on a dish that doesn’t even come with them” or something.
Based on my own experience, I’d say it was more a matter of didn’t care or didn’t pay attention to the order. The cook might have been running on automatic.
I tend to eat at just a few restaurants where I can be reasonably sure of them honoring special requests. Every so often I hear the waitress chewing out the cook for screwing up the order.
You are forgetting in this fantasy time, a hint of “spicy” or anything else too exotic would lead everyone to say they can’t tolerate “spicy” food or that foreign food gives them indigestion. The US palate is the most inclusive it has ever been.
True, somewhat off-topic story: When I was a teenager, I started teaching myself to cook from cookbooks, because my mom’s idea of cooking was either Depression-era food she’d learned from her own mother (creamed tuna fish on toast, mmmm) or frozen foods.
I made a lasagna once. She raved about it and later told all of her friends that I had made the most delicious “spicy” lasagna. You know, spicy - because it had oregano, parsley, and thyme in it. :smack:
Yeah, it really is. May you be stricken by a migraine sometime in the near future.
(Although I really, REALLY am sick of hearing about everyone’s bowel problems. TMI, people. TMI)
Don’t go to Papadeaux. I’m allergic to shellfish and there was only like five things on the menu without shellfish and they were all fish dishes of some type (three being unseasoned fish).