How do restaurants keep roast beef? They always have it on the menu, do they cook a new roast everyday?
I would think it would be expensive and quite wasteful.
Just curious…
MtM
It’s a gamble. There’s two ways they can go -
First is to pop a roast in the oven in the afternoon so by the time they start serving, it’ll at least be to rare. When they open, another goes in, so roughly 90-120 minutes later, it’s rare. (These are usually roughly 20-30 pound cuts of meat, so they cook slower and lower than what you’d do at home) Ideally, this gives them a supply of rare - medium-rare meat to work with through the night. If someone wants medium-well, all they need to do is slice off the serving from the rare roast and pop it into the oven for a bit. If someone asks for less done than what’s available, all they can do is apologize and say that all that’s left is more done than desired. Meat left over at the end of the day? Oops. Chop it up and make beef stew or chili, or simmer it in gravy and call it pot roast.
Another way is to cook roasts to rare and then stop. Slice 'em up and refrigerate the slices. Then, it’s a few minutes in the oven to bring the slice to the desired level. An endless supply of rare to whatever doneness, but the end result doesn’t come out quite the same as if it had been normally roasted.
Depends on the restaurant and their menu.In houses where a lot of roast beef isn’t sold you can buy already cooked roasts (usually a top round).This is what you’ll get a lot of times in a lightly trafficked Holiday Inn dining room for example,as “Roast sirloin of beef” or “hot roast beef sandwich”.
In a steakhouse you put as many roasts in the oven as past business has required,at different intervals thruout the afternoon to have them come ready at your peak dining hours.
Leftovers become either a different dish,a hastily heated up piece for a latenight supper customer,frozen in individual serving portions,or fare for the help that night (or the next night,etc.)