Seems like an awful lot of work to shave a few cents off the cost of a steak that’s marked up… what, 500%?
I would be deeply displeased by the use of this technique to defraud(which, unfortunately, seems like a fairly plausible use case); and would support vigorous punishment, in line with those for other flavors of commercial fraud.
Otherwise, though, as long as your sanitary handling practices are good enough that the scraps being fused aren’t a bacterial nightmare compared to solid cuts, this seems like a great way to turn something that can’t be prepared in steak style into something that can. There are plenty of uses for smaller pieces of meat; but if you want to grill something without messing around with skewers, or otherwise do something suited to steak, such pieces would ordinarily be unhelpful.
PUT…HIM…IN…THE…CUR-RY!
Their food handling practices can’t be good enough to allow them to cook that “steak” to anything other than well done. It’s essentially ground beef.
[His comments on fast food aside] Is this something that has happened, or is he demonstrating a technique that could be used for such a thing?
Also, while I know that bulk typically gives a better price, this stuff isn’t all that cheap…add in the labor and still needing the base meat: it doesn’t seem all too huge of a cash cow to do this.
I’ve got no beef with this, as long as it’s disclosed up front.
I’m making my Frankensteak outta beef, chicken and bacon! Maybe some other kinda of critter in there, too!
Clever little thing, aren’t you… 
says YouTuber Ballistic BBQ
Well, if Ballistic BBQ said it, it’s gotta be true.
Do you have any citation about 'how some restaurants sneaky craft…"
Because I think it’s total bullshait. Using meat glue is a PITA…and it’s expensive and probably won’t come out like you think unless your Ferran Adrià.
Because generally when Transglutaminase is used in a restaurant dish…it’s about 20 dollars for the silver dollar sized portion and they proudly proclaim the fact it’s made from ‘parts’.
/edit…I’m not sure if the “bunch of bull” is refering to the BBQ guy’s comment
or just a pun on beef gluing.
//Also using Transglutaminase requires wearing masks and wearing gloves…while it’s in the ‘active’ stages (before it’s cooked) and a powder…breathing it is nasty bad thing…because it can glue the bits in your lungs together.
Watch! How the number one chef in the world (1999-2011)…TRICKS his guests to eating noodles made out of parmesean cheese whey.
http://www.albertyferranadria.com/eng/videos-and-recipes-gelification01.html
Amaze yourself at the demonic ability of chemicals to create a FRANKEN FISH…WITH VEGETABLE STUCK TO IT…http://www.albertyferranadria.com/eng/videos-and-recipes-gelification05.html
Shudder and Cower in HORROR! as he transform Lowly OLIVES into a spawn of un natural trickery.
Scream in TERROR…when you get the 600 dollar per person bill for the 30 course dinner.
Yeah I’ve spent the bulk of my life working the restaurant business. Many of my friends are professional chefs. And I’ve even worked at some fairly sketchy operations, as have a lot of people I know. And I’ve never even heard of meat glue being used to defraud. The stuff is not just a pain to work with, but its expensive and hard to come by. Not the sort of thing you can just run out and pick up, or get dropped off by your usual suppliers. I know one guy who works with it. Just one. And he’s pretty heavy into modernist cooking and works exclusively at pricey haute cuisine places. Even then he uses it rarely, for complex shit like perfectly cylindrical cured rabbit roulades wrapped in fat intact duck skin and sous vidededededed until pasteurized in a mold, dressed with foams and encapsulated sauces etc, etc. The sort of thing that takes days or weeks to prep, costs you 50 bucks for a small portion, and proudly lists all its technical weird on the frikin menu as justification for the cost.
I’m willing to bet this guy is just scaremongering. Otherwise I’m gonna ask “what restaurants?” and require him to prove its more than a handful of places who tried and failed to pull this off.
Agreed - although with fraud sometimes it’s a mooving target.
The only way meat glue is used at a cheep restaurant is geting KRAB from a suppler for that KRAB salad sandwich…or those little Filet Mignon stuff they buy from walmart or Sysco…
http://www.examiner.com/article/filet-mignon-a-la-walmart-review-of-walmart-filet-mignon-prepackaged-steak
But rest assured the restaurant isn’t hand crafting this stuff in the back room.
If a restaurant uses this…They should jack up the price.
“Hand crafted steak from sustainable meat parts lovingly transformed and sousvide for 24 hours with a basil butter sauce”.
PEOPLE! We are losing sight of something very obvious!
Bacon steak!
basically! From what I understand the use in high end food is derived as much of the modernist food stuff is from industrial usage. So theoretically the headline could read “how some large industrial food suppliers that provide insanly cheap and low quality steaks to Outback and international manufacturers of off brand deli cold cuts craft shitty food from interesting science”. With most decent cold cuts just salt, molds, time, and some slight pressure will do the same job as the meat glue. That’s why your ham sandwich has meat that’s always the same shape and doesn’t separate around where it was boned out. But if you’re making 10,000lbs of the stuff at a stretch meat glue is a lot quicker.
edit Its just occured to me the reference to “molds” above might be misconstrued. We’re not talking about classy charcuterie here. The molds in question are not tasty fungus. I’m refering to literal plastic roughly ham shaped forms used to make sure even whole muscle cold cuts are a consistent shape and size. Basically imagine you have deboned a ham, that ham will have seams and gaps where it was cut open. Most cold cut manufacturers take that ham and while its still wet and actively curing, press it into a ham shaped plastic mold. Time, salt, and pressure make sure it has a consistent size/shape and also that the seams seal shut as if they were never there.
Any restaurant trying to do this on the small scale is going to run into the fact that the labor, time, and expense involved is going to make their knock off more expensive. Maybe it won’t be as expensive as high end dry aged prime. But it’s going to make it more expensive than everyday cheap steak like you get at the supermarket. Economies of scale mean that a large processor, working internationally, and supplying Wallyworld can make a killing. You’re local diner not so much. I mean I haven’t run numbers on it or anything. But for example the place I work now its costs about a dollar more just in food costs, no other expenses accounted for, to make a pizza than it does to buy a pizza at full retail from Little Caesars. And making even a shitty burger that costs a restaurant twice what McDougals sells theirs for has been impossible in my area for a long, long time.
Isn’t he talking about exactly that? I didn’t infer that chefs are going to all this trouble doing it themselves in the kitchen, but that it’s an industrial process used by manufacturers, next to their pink slime vats.
I don’t know what the legal standard is for what you’re allowed to refer to as steak, but considering Steak-Umms® exist I’m guessing it’s a low bar to clear. It may not be legally fraudulent but it’s misleading. It’s bad enough how many sit-down restaurants pass off prepackaged items as if they were made in-house; mischaracterizing the food is an added insult.
I don’t think they 'pass them off" as much as what you should expect for the price.
You get a Crab Salad Sandwich for 3 dollars…you bet it’s KRAB. YOU should KNOW it’s KRAB sticks chopped up with mayo and stuff.
You get a 3 dollar Cheese Steak…you might get real beef because have you EVEN PRICED STEAKUM’s Now. SHAIT that stuff is about 6 bucks for couple of sandwiches worth and it doesn’t include cheese or bread.
Hell…BoingBoing passes off their stuff as “news”…(ahhhh…). If you want to get technically right…which is the best kind.
