A lot of people are fairly non-confrontational. They won’t honk at someone in traffic, they won’t say anything when someone’s exhibiting unacceptable behavior, and they won’t send an improperly prepared meal back to the kitchen. I suspect a lot of people are afraid of escalating the situation and being retaliated against.
There are videos.
Catsup on a hot dog.
It’s a dish that looks really good until…
I kinda get it. I don’t like well done steak, and it always feels like a waste of a nice piece of meat. But I’m a picky eater, and get the same reaction from other foods, too. I watched our own @Mangetout on YouTube making something that looked delicious and then he threw in some bell peppers. I wanted to scream “Noooooo!” at the screen. I know, intellectually, that many people LIKE cooked bell pepper in their food. But something that looked delicious suddenly looked revolting, which is kinda jarring. I think a lot of people get the same reaction to well done steak.
I mean, sure, eat what you like. And I’m not going to mock you for your leathery steak with ketchup. And i restrained myself from making a comment about the peppers, too. I assume he knows what he’s doing and he likes the things. But i get where the emotion comes from.
It’s astonishing how many people think this regularly happens.
Yeah, lots of weird stuff happens rarely. Honestly, if the restaurant staff is going to spit in my food because i ask for a steak that’s cooked the way i ordered it, they are likely to spit in my food because I’m Jewish, or because they don’t like my voice, or… I always try to be pleasant and respectful to the staff, and i expect them to be pleasant and respectful to me in return.
I was going to say “Pineapple on pizza” but really just pizza in general. From ingredient purists to specific styles to NY/Chicago/Wherever to the dorks who insist that unless you were sitting in Florence, Italy at the time, it wasn’t “real pizza”.
At least the steak knoblords narrow it down to a single complaint about how you fucked up cooking your steak. Pizza assholes have a full spectrum of reasons why you suck and deserve to feel bad about your dinner.
You know other than jokes about hawaiian style, I dont get any of that. I mean there was a New Yorker who said you could only get NY style pizza in NY, until I took him to a place in Hollywood. He said it was really close, made him homesick. BUT he wasnt claim NY style pizza is the greatest the one the only, he was just saying that style didnt work outside NY.
I dont think it actually has anything much to do with actually how to cook steak or prepare pizza or which way to cut your sandwich (thats one i get idiots lecturing me about frequently). People have preferences, for sure. When they try to loudly assert their preference is the best or only way to do a thing, it’s about drawing attention, not about food. I think it’s a pretty insecure thing to do to try to tell someone else that their food preference is objectively wrong. (I mean, if it’s earnest, not in jest)
Once on a business trip to one of the convention cities in the US (Vegas or Orlando? they all run together), a group of us were at a high end steak restaurant. The server make quite a production of dramatically cutting the steaks in half at the table to show how they were cooked perfectly. Except for one; which was wrong. I don’t remember if it was overcooked or under. That one got replaced completely.
I went to Italy this summer with my son, and made some Italians friends online.
One of these friends said that this would be the greatest chance for me to eat pizza since a real Italian restaurant would never commit such sacrilege as to use pineapple.
I had to send him a photo of the menu of a restaurant in Italy including pizza with pineapple. It was interesting because the area was actually more for German tourists than Americans so it wasn’t simply us Yankees’ fault. (That the pizza was good there, although I passed up the chance of ordering the pineapple topping. I’m not sure if I regret that now or not.)
4 people at the restaurant, 2 ordered med rare, two ordered medium.
Waiter says to cut into the steaks to make sure they are cooked as requested.
All four look the same.
And the waiter didn’t wait. My parents were 1/3 through their meals before somebody came back.
I don’t mind them cooking the same steak a bit longer. But do it fast and don’t make me wait.
We did get our same steaks back.
And we got all the desserts. As apology for the mistake.
I don’t really know, either, but I can posit several factors.
The reference in the graphic to “mommy” probably has some validity. My mother, who was actually a good cook when it came to traditional foods that she knew how to prepare well, always served me steak well done. This was because she had an irrational fear of cooties of some kind and believed that only incinerating the steak would kill them off. It wasn’t until I moved out on my own and bought my first barbecue that I realized that steak was actually tasty. I’m sure she wasn’t the only “mommy” who did that, and some of us probably harbour some resentment about the steaks of our childhood.
Maybe another reason is that some individuals who think they like a steak well done then try to compensate for the dryness and tastelessness by dumping ketchup on it, thus compounding the problem and creating a thoroughly inedible mess out of good food. That kind of culinary ignorance is infuriating just on general principle. The fact that it’s famously practiced by a certain former president universally known for bad taste in everything just adds to the infamy.
My mother didn’t overcook steak, she made some rare for the rest of us. But she preferred well done everything. I talked with her about chicken. She really preferred chicken and turkey cooked until it was dry and powdery, then sliced very thin so it wasn’t tough, and covered in gravy so it wasn’t dry and flavorless.
(I cook poultry just past the unified FDA safety mark, including resting as part of the pasteurization process. My chicken is juicy and succulent, and I’m too lazy to make gravy except for Thanksgiving.)
This isn’t an explanation of the thing I was complaining about, it’s just an example of it.
I wonder if I can get that on a t-shirt?
Thanks, you saved me the trouble of posting the same thing.
Seems to me that saying that maybe “some of us probably harbour some resentment about the steaks of our childhood” sure sounds like a potential explanation to me, though it may only be true for some small minority of us. I can see your point if you’re coming from a perspective that over- well-done steak is a perfectly acceptable preference, whereas I was trying to explain how some of us who had to endure it in childhood experienced a delightful revelation when we learned how to cook steaks properly.
Yes, that picture is rather obnoxiously judgmental, but most of us know how overcooking ruins most foods, most especially good cuts of beef, and wonderment about people who intentionally do this to their steak isn’t really surprising.
You ask “what it is about steak that makes so many people so absolutely insufferable about people having different preferences”. I don’t think most of us are as obnoxiously judgmental as the captions in that picture, but here’s the point. Preferring steak medium rather than rare is a preference. There’s a pretty wide range of steak doneness and all of them are preferences. Not liking steak at all is a preference. But a steak that is cooked to the point of being brown all the way through and having both the appearance and texture of shoe leather is the kind of thing that many good chefs, normally happy to cater to customer preferences and even eccentricities, will just refuse to indulge. Maybe in your mind they’re being “pricks”, too. I think they’re just being chefs.
QFT. My parents never ate any meat that wasn’t cremated. My first medium steak was a delight. My first rare steak was transmogrifying. Now I have a list of the restaurants in Vegas with the best tartare.
Wait, why would you send any of those steaks back? I do not understand?
My parents were both perfectly competent in the kitchen. My mother cooked a lot of meat well done because she liked it that way. My husband is a very good cook. He’s had plenty of opportunity to try rare meat. He likes his meat well done. A tiny bit of pink is okay, but not required.
Different people like different foods.
(I think the impulse that says, “no, stop overcooking that meat!” is similar to the impulse that says, “you’re doing sex wrong and that’s repulsive.” Sadly natural, but an impulse to be short-circuited when noticed. Live and let live. And about taste there is no disputing.)