Even at fine dining restaurants, serving pre-made food is a common practice most patrons are
not aware of.
So how can you know for sure your food was made before you ever sat down at your table?
Here's how to tell if the food you're eating is fresh.
You may be excited to see your waitress approaching with your food as not long after you order
it, but the biggest indicator that you're dining at a restaurant serving pre-made food
is how quickly your food arrives at the table.
"Mmmm, don't you just love it when you come back from the bathroom to find your food waiting
for you?"
A freshly prepared meal that's made to order takes time.
What doesn't take much time is reheating pre-made food, like is often done at fast-food restaurants.
If you're at a non fast-food restaurant and the food comes out lickety-split like drive-thru
service, that's a telltale sign that the restaurant is serving pre-made food.
After all, it should take a lot longer to make a fresh grilled chicken breast or risotto
than it does to assemble a fast food burger.
"Whoa!"
"Ed.
I see you."
One look at a menu offering items a mile long may send your brain into a tizzy trying to
figure out how the chef does it.
Well, here's a little secret: they probably don't.
An extensive menu means the chef has to have all those ingredients on-hand, which makes
it difficult to guarantee freshness along with timeliness.
Can you imagine sifting through the ingredients for 100 different entrees, and then trying
to cook them all at once?
To solve this problem, chefs often use pre-made food.
That can range from already packaged products to preparing the meals in advance, but either
way, they're getting a head start, and the quality of your meal may suffer from it.
"They are fresh when they come in.
We do cut them and then we freeze them and then we pull them to order."
"So they're not fresh, they're frozen."
"C-Correct."
If you pick up a menu that has pages and pages of items on offer, maybe check out the new
place next door instead.
Often enough, the establishment you're dining at is the first indicator that your meal is
pre-made.
Choosing a chain restaurant for your dining destination may seem like a safe choice, you
know what's on the menu, and you know what it's going to taste like, no matter what city
you're in.
Chain restaurants are consistent in their meals for a reason, they're pre-made.
If you've ever wondered why, say, your alfredo dish at Olive Garden looks and tastes the
same no matter what Olive Garden you're at, it's because there's probably not a chef in
the back painstakingly preparing each dish from scratch.
Chain restaurants usually have a rigorous process of food preparation that happens before
it even reaches the restaurant.
The food is often mass produced, frozen, and then heated and assembled according to strict
guidelines.
So yes, your alfredo will be the same every single time you order it, and so will most
of your other meals at chain restaurants.
For them, consistency is key.
That may be a good thing if you like that dish, but it's time to give up on misconceptions
that it's a freshly-made meal.
Say you're at a restaurant and you order a steak cooked rare.
You wait in anticipation, salivating over the thought of slicing into a juicy, pink
steak.
Your order arrives, and it looks just like you imagined it would, except for the taste.
You've had a rare steak before, but this seems more like rubber than meat.
That's probably because your steak hit the microwave before it hit your plate.
And it's not only the texture that changes when it's been microwaved.
Studies have shown that meat cooked in a microwave will have less flavor than meat cooked on
a grill, as the rapid cooking means it has much less time for the flavor to develop.
Anyone who has prepared a home cooked meal can tell the difference between something
prepared fresh, and something that's been nuked to death in the microwave.
When you order food at a restaurant and the textures and tastes are a bit off, you know
in an instant that your meal wasn't fresh.
How much time it spent reheating in the microwave on the other hand, is a question you can ask
your server.
"Who cooked that Dustin?"
"That's Chef Mike."
"Who?"
"Chef Mike.
It's a microwave."
A menu containing nothing but fried seafood?
Now we smell something fishy.
Restaurants that only offer seafood in fried form is a clear indicator that the restaurant
doesn't serve fresh fish.
Breading and frying seafood is an easy way for cooks to mask the fact that the fish was
previously frozen.
It's possible that they didn't even bread the fish themselves.
Food distributors offer a variety of pre-made fried fish, so all the restaurant has to do
is heat and serve.
Next time you order up a plate of fried Baja fish tacos or fish and chips, don't be surprised
if your fish was reheated in a deep fryer.
Especially if there's not a piece of breadless, non-fried fish in sight.
Leaving cheese or bacon off a burger shouldn't be a problem at a sit-down restaurant.
But how about ditching the mushrooms in your veggie lasagna ? Or the chicken in your minestrone
soup?
High-end restaurants can surely handle a request like that, right?
"So is everything ok?
Is something wrong?
Are you mad?"
If your servers says they can't make a substitution, it's probably because that dish has already
been made.
Think about when you make these meals at home.
You don't make single portions, and neither do the restaurants.
Making certain menu items from scratch would take a great deal of time, not to mention
slow down service.
So if you notice that certain menu items can't be substituted, odds are they've prepared
it in advance, and reheated once you ordered it.
Anyone who has prepared a frozen dinner can easily attest to the flavors of freezer burn;
they can also detect it when a restaurant serves it.
Freezer burn changes the composition of your food, resulting in off flavors, textures,
and colors.
This is especially noticeable when eating meat.
Before you even have a chance to bite into the steak your waiter just placed in front
of you, check to see if there are some grayish spots.
If so, that's freezer burn, and it may have been cooked before it hit the freezer.
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