Welcome back to Behind Closed Ovens, where we take a look at the best and strangest stories from inside the food industry. We’re back to an old standby this week: people eating—in many cases gleefully—things that stretch the bounds of edibility. As always, these are real e-mails from real readers.
Tara Glenning:
I’m a pastry cook in a very high-end steakhouse in Chicago. One of the desserts we’re known for is our “cake in a can,” which is an entire red velvet cake, baked to order, frosted and cut table-side. Since the cake takes 45 minutes to bake, the diners have to order it at the beginning of the meal.
When they’re ready for dessert, we first send out steel measuring cups with egg beaters dipped in a bit of the batter. I think it’s a gross gimmick since the batter contains raw eggs and is often several days old, but people seem to love it. After they’ve licked their beaters clean, we send out the cake, a bowl of cream cheese frosting, and several scoops of roasted vanilla bean ice cream.
Last night, two big spenders who are apparently regulars at the restaurant sat down and asked for just the batter and the cream cheese frosting, no cake. After the server explained the request to me, I sent out several egg beaters drenched in the batter, and a bowl of frosting.
A minute later, the server returned and said “This just got really weird. They want the whole cake, unbaked.” So I put almost three cups of raw, several day old, red velvet batter in a large bowl and sent it out.
They ate the whole thing.
Mike Cameron:
As I completed my bachelor’s degree and began job hunting while my (now ex-) wife finished her own degree, I took a job at a now-defunct middling family restaurant in Troy, Alabama—at the time, it was probably the best non-chain, non-BBQ eatery in what was then a sleepy college town (i.e., a nondescript rural municipality that happened to have a college, though you could drive through town and never realize it). I had held a number of restaurant jobs in my life, so I was hired to be a cook immediately and train to be a manager. Well, in reality, I was hired to cook, as the management possibility never materialized once I proved capable in the understaffed kitchen. This was a surprise to me, since despite my restaurant experience, the one thing I’d never done was cook.
We were a pretty stereotypical Southern family joint—po’ boys, all manner of fried foods (even “steak fingers”), big steaks, salads, pasta, you get the idea. My first night on the grill, we get an order for a rare New York strip. OK, no problem. Get some nice grill marks on the outside, keep a cool, red center. It takes less than 10 minutes, then rests, and then I send it to the plating station, where the waitress picks it up along with several other plates.
I’ve moved on to a couple of T-bones when I hear my name in a sweet south Alabama drawl and turn around to see the waitress with the rare steak, cut in half, not a bite out of it. “He says it’s too cooked.” Too cooked? I look at the kitchen manager, worried about wasting pricier products on my first day at the grill. He takes a peek and says, “Well, looks rare. Cook it less than that, I guess.”
Grateful not to be blamed, I pull out another strip, deciding to grill just two minutes on each side, thinking it might be a bit light but it’s easier to cook it more than to pull out another steak and waste more food. In no time, it’s back at the plating station, and almost as quickly as it left the kitchen, it returned.
“Mike—he says it’s still too cooked. And he’s pissed, since everyone else is eating already and he isn’t.”
At this point, I’m stunned and wondering if the Chicago idea of rare is that different from the South Alabama version. I also don’t want to cause problems for the waitresses, since they worked really hard for generally mediocre tips, and they were generally close to the owner, since his daughter was among them. My manager looks at the steak and then at me, then goes to talk to the customer. He returns and says, “Well, I guess Mr. Ten Gallon Hat wants it blue.” Despite my comparatively urban upbringing, I had never heard the term, so I asked, “Blue?” and was told, “Basically raw.”
Obviously, that’s not the best description of a blue steak, but I don’t know any better. I figure I couldn’t just take the steak out of the cooler and put it on the plate, so I hesitated a moment to figure out how to proceed before I lost griller status for good. We had a slightly slanted grill, so I take the steak and plopped it on the top edge of the grill, pressing it down with my tongs, and slide it slowly down to the bottom of the grill. I flip it to the other side and did the same. Total cooking time: maybe 40 seconds. The vertical sides are clearly not even starting to cook. The surfaces that had touched the grill basically has light sear marks with red visible between them. I bring it to the plating station to raised eyebrows from my co-workers. The manager seems unsure what to do when the waitress comes to pick it up with a silent, Southern belle version of a “This better fucking work” sort of look.
The waitress returns a minute later with a smile on her face and shrugs, saying, “Well, he’s eating it and shutting up, so that’s all I could ask for.” He doesn’t complain a bit more and leaves a generous tip. The same guy came in one more time later that summer and requested that I cook his steak, although I was on the salad prep area that night. I cooked it the same way, sliding it down the grill on both sides, and sent it out, getting a “my compliments to the chef” response for the first and only time in my brief cooking career. Happily, I found a full-time job in my degree field before I got to “cook” a third hunk of raw cow for the same guy.
Catie Walters:
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