A particular restaurant I like often has a seafood pasta Alfredo on the menu as a special. Crab, shrimp, or lobster served in an Alfredo sauce over a bed of pasta. It’s excellent and worth the substantial calories. But, the dish is so incredibly mouth burning hot when it’s served. I assume this is due to some cooking technique, my WAG is that they use some flash method to cook the pasta. Any other ideas?
Microwave?!
Sitting under a heat lamp for a bit?
I thought that would cause the plate to be scorching hot, not necessarily the food itself.
I think this is it.
Are they microwaving the pasta? The sauce?
The plated meal, I’d guess.
ETA: and it is really just a guess. Shame on the restaurant that uses a microwave to do anything other than melt chocolate or butter.
I’m guessing that they probably cook the sauce ahead of time, and keep it warm, and cook the pasta and crustaceans at the last minute- pasta doesn’t sit well after cooking, and shellfish get tough if you cook them too hot/too long. But the sauce part could very well keep for a while at serving temps.
So combine a bunch of boiling hot pasta straight out of the pot, some 140+ degree sauce, and some shellfish cooked to probably somewhere between 120 (shrimp) and 140 (lobster, crab) and serve. The boiling hot pasta will more than likely heat the whole thing up at first- probably not enough to overcook the crustaceans, but enough to seem very hot to you as it’s served.
The nearby chain pizza place also sells subs and pasta dishes, so I ordered the lasagna. It came to my table absolutely cold in the middle, which I mentioned to the waiter. He took it away, and it came back steaming hot, but they had obviously just reheated the plate in a microwave, and the whole thing had turned to soup.
They comped the meal.
The OP didn’t say which restaurant that he gets these too hot dishes at, but it is well know that places like Applebees prepare most of the food at their central facilities, it is shipped out frozen to the individual stores and the individual “restaurants” microwave the food before serving.
It is OK to like the food but you should be aware that many of these places are just microwaving fancy TV dinners. At least the food is consistent.
Could it be because they put the food on a hot dish from some dish warming device? The hot surface would keep the food at the temperature it was cooked.
The same way a “hot cappuccino” involves just preheating the cup, since you can’t really heat the ingredients themselves any more without destroying the taste.
That’s what I was thinking. I read somewhere that it’s often done because pasta goes cold quickly. I usually do it when cooking in the coldest winter months.