When I make steak for myself, it’s about 30 minutes from start to finish, with very little “banding.” I don’t sous vide. I just use the reverse sear. 1 1/2 - 2 inch steaks. It works great. The flipping-every-30-seconds method works great, too.
ETA: And with restaurants that sous vide, they do it ahead of time, of course. You can hold a sous vide-d steak for quite awhile.
The joy of sous-vide is that a steakhouse could sous-vide a number of their steaks to 110°F at the beginning of the shift, hold them at that temperature indefinitely, and finish in the salamander to the desired doneness. For home chefs without sous-vide cooking extra-thick steaks, simply plan ahead and cook in a 225°F (or lower) oven while the chef prepares the rest of the meal.
And, yes, any steak lover knows that the tenderloin/filet mignon/cute cut is not a beefy cut of meat. It’s fairly bland, which is why it’s often served with a pretty pepped-up pan sauce (see steak au poivre, for the classic example.) That said, being a bland and inoffensive cut, I like it for dinner parties, since it’s dead simple to prepare and gussy up, and nobody in their right mind is going to complain about being served filet. (I’m a ribeye man, myself, but some people find ribeye too fatty, so rather than get several types of steaks, I’ll buy a tenderloin, trim it, and cut it into 2-inch steaks. I have a 10-year-old niece who likes her steaks even bloodier than I do!)
In a restaurant if I order medium rare the steak is often overcooked, so I order rare.
At home, I sous-vide rare or medium rare, then do a quick sear.
I love very good meat carpaccio.
What is with this attitude? And I’m not slamming you pulykamell, more the general notion that well done steak is repulsive. I’ve never had rare meat, but on occasion have had medium beef–and the flavors of well done to me are much better. Why is beef the only taste flavor people aren’t allowed to enjoy? Honestly, this sounds like “you’re not a REAL MAN unless the spices give you third degree burns” male one-upsmanship.
Hmmm. I like mine quite pink in the center, beyond raw or just warm in the center. To me, that’s medium rare.
At a good steak house, I’ll order mine “medium rare to medium”.
At a casual restaurant or bar, I’ll order medium rare because they tend to over-cook, and it comes back anywhere from rare to medium-well. I generally eat it no matter what.
At home, I try to get the medium rare I like and am usually reasonably successful.
Why don’t you trust yourself to cook a medium steak? If you get it a little underdone, you can always slap it back on the grill or pan for a minute on each side.
This has generally been my experience, as well. When they miss my medium rare request, it’s almost always done too much, to medium or medium well. I like my hamburgers medium to medium well, with just a little pink in the middle and juicy. When I ask for medium, it often comes back well done.
Either a cut obtained within seconds of slaughter (to maximize flavor) or fire-grilled until it’s scorched to a fine powder.
Variety is the spice of life.
Medium rare. An aristocrat!
I think you are misreading me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with well done steak. The “nonsense” is that he’s “one of the few that recognizes cooking meat makes it more tender.” It makes steaks tougher. We’ve had this argument before. It does make some types of meat (those high in collagen and connective tissue) more tender, given enough time and slow enough heat, but that’s a different process than making steaks. Steak, as it approaches 170F, tightens up and gets less tender. The only explanation is that Chronos and I (and most people I know) just have different ideas of what “tender” is. There’s even quantified objective measurements of slice shear force that are used by the beef industry to determine tenderness. These correlate well with sensory palatal tenderness ratings. These show that lower levels of doneness lead to a more tender steak, not the other way around.
Once again: I cook steaks to all levels of doneness. I don’t care how you like your steak. But it gets less tender the more it is cooked. (Unless, I suppose, you start with a particularly gristly and poor piece of meat that is chewy, and in that case, you have to cook it to well to be able to chew it at all. Good steak is perfectly tender and chewable raw. And chewiness is a different metric than tenderness.)
This is backwards. Cooking initially makes the meat tougher, until you cook it for a long time like a roast, at which point it will become tender and moist again due to the breakdown of connective tissue. That’s why we tend to cook meat two ways: quick and rare like steak or slow and long like brisket. In between, what you get is tough and dry. That’s why chefs call well done a waste of a good steak. If you prefer well done beef, order the pot roast.
That sure is a normal distribution!
Yep, the more blunt chefs say that there are 3 ways to cook a steak - rare, medium rare and ruined. I take mine medium rare. I also prefer a leaner cut of meat, so a medium rare filet mignon is my idea of steak perfection.
There’s a market near me that will cut filets to order. I buy ridiculously thick filet mignon, sou-vide/sear them rare and they are heavenly.
One of the people behind the counter told me she’d have to butterfly a filet that thick in order to get it medium-rare. I explained to her about sous-vide cooking. The next time I stopped, she asked for a specific device name, and she now owns an Anova.
I’ve had well-done steaks that fall apart when you stick a fork into them. If that’s not tender, then I don’t know what the word means.
I think that, if you have had a well-done steak that fell apart at the touch of a fork, you weren’t eating a steak. You were eating slow-roasted beef in the form of a steak. 
Can you replicate this “well-done steak” using the methods involved in cooking steak (not including sous-vide, which, in my opinion is a whole different kettle of fish, since it takes for-EVER to finish; might as well toss the thing in a crock pot at that rate)? Do you have expert backing with an understanding of how steak (as opposed to other cuts of meat) becomes tender as it cooks? I ask out of curiosity, because you’re not known to me as someone who doesn’t understand the importance of science as applied to cooking.
The only ways to get fork tender well-done fall-apart steaks is one of two methods (at least that I could think of):
You are using a cut of beef that is not a classic “steak” cut, like chuck steak, and cooking it low and slow for a long time such that the collagen in the cut breaks down and creates a truly fork tender product a la pot roast.
You have either mechanically or enzymatically tenderized the meat. By mechanical, I mean using something like a Jaccard or even a fork to poke many many small holes into the meat a la cube steak (cube steak will separate with a fork at well done temperatures without a problem). Or by using a marinade containing papain (found in papayas) and/or bromelain (found in pineapple) to enzymatically tenderize the meat. You have to be careful with this method, as it’s fairly easy to over-tenderize and turn the meat into mush.
I can’t replicate it (or at least, I’ve never tried), but I watched the guy who did it, over a backyard charcoal grill. I assume that’s a standard steak-cooking method? The only substances he put on the steak were a dry rub of salt and a few spices, and I don’t think he used a mechanical tenderizer.
I prefer medium rare. If it’s overdone, I can eat a medium. And if it’s underdone I can send it back. I like some juice to sop up with my steak fries.
I was going to say! Looks like the mean is medium rare and the standard deviation is a single level difference in the cooking. Using the empirical rule, population-wise, it means:
~68% like their steak between rare and medium inclusive
~95% like their steak between blue rare and medium well inclusive
~99.7% like their steak between raw and well down inclusive
I think that’s about right.
Rare or medium rare are the only correct answers. Anything else is wrong.
Yes, opinions can be wrong, and thinking that anything over “medium rare” for steak is a good thing is one of them.
Kidding.
Mostly. 