I realize food is usually Cafe Society, but I’m looking for a factual answer first. If it wanders over to CS later for war stories, that’s fine by me!
We just attended a convention held at a fairly low-budget Holiday Inn. The banquet staff were clearly in over their heads, and by Saturday evening I really wasn’t looking forward to the steak dinner.
And my fears were not unfounded, as our table was served its mis-steaks. It was honestly the worst I’d seen. I took one courtesy bite from the best-looking part of it, and could not proceed. It wasn’t just tough, in was tough, and spongy and liver-flavored and stringy. It was served with butter knives, not steak knives, LOL.
Anyway, to the fact-based portion of the question - how would they have cooked it to get such bad results? Is it possible they boiled it? Could a pressure cooker have been involved?
Would the vegetarian option have been a better choice? Maybe, but it was vegetable lasagna made with cheddar cheese and served with a baked potato on the side. Yes, lasagna with a side of baked potato. Okey-doke.
The problem with banquet type deal is one of scale. A regular motel type place doesn’t have the facilites to cook 100 meals at once. They will have to cook your steak an hour or three before you eat and then they have to keep it somewhere vaguely warm until they’re ready for you. That’s a recipe for turning meat into shoe leather.
What Tapoica said. Good steak has a very short edible life span if it’s expected to be served in top condition, and is not usually something that does well where food has to be staged in advance and “keep” well. I’m surprised anyone chose that (or allowed it to be chosen) as a banquet item. Add clueless to “in over their heads”.
After years of attending awards banquets and the like, I’ve learned to always go for the vegetarian option. There are a lot fewer ways of screwing veggies and fruit than there are meat.
Steak is one of the few things that can be done well in advance. Sear it on both sides to get a nice crust, and throw it in the fridge. Bring it out 30 min before you want to serve it and put it in the oven for 15-15 minutes, depending on how you want it done. It turns out perfect.
Back to the OP, my guess is that they started with a bad piece of meat and it got worse from there. “Spongy” and “liver flavored” sounds like a low-quality steak shot through with artificial flavorings and frozen for a long, long time. That’s my guess, at least.
Couldn’t spongy come not only from being frozen for a very long time, but being frozen a long time in non air tight container (frost burn) or being frozen then thawed then re-frozen, rethawed.
Liver taste means it might have been onglet or hanger steak. I dunno, it used to be cheap in the US but it seems to have gone up in price once it became trendy. Maybe the restaurant got a special deal on it.
Right, but if you’ve got a lot of them, you can’t throw them all in the oven for 15 minutes 15 minutes before dinner. If you don’t have facilities for large quantities, you may not have facilities to reheat/finish cooking large quantities right before either.
Hehe. This is a trick I learned a long time ago when pre-ordering for a staff christmas dinner; 95+% of the folks attending are going to be tempted by the idea of a large slab of animal protein (especially if the occasion makes it traditional to consume such things) - so the omnivorous main course is going to be cooked in buckets and bathtubs, with a predictable loss of attention to detail and quality. The much smaller demand for the veggie option means it will have received more individual attention.
Only trouble is that ordering the veggie option makes everyone think you’re a vegetarian and you will probably be the butt of a few jokes (although you’re in a position to be able to slap these down pretty effectively)
I assumed that the place offering the banquet had at least a standard commercial kitchen. I’m no expert, but I know I could fit 15-25 steaks in my own home oven, maybe more. I’d guess a commercial kitchen would have no problem throwing 30 or maybe even 40 in an oven.
The thing that makes this possible is that unlike a lot of food, they don’t have to be done on top of the stove. Making 40 steaks at a time on the grill or fry top may be difficult; throwing them on cookie sheets in the oven is pretty easy.
For what it’s worth, I do my steaks at home the same way. Sear on both sides, stick in the oven to finish. Comes out perfectly rare to medium rare all the way through. Yum!
