Half the time it would just be a Sysco product list.
Biggest surprise in when I worked in restaurants in college was how all three “fancy restaurants” ordered the same type of soups from Sysco. Chefs did spice it up differently.
Or the units of measurement would be “half of big pot”
Why would they? It’s takes work with no return. It’s giving something of value (theoretically) for nothing in return, not even good relations for the restaurant since they are now gone.
Nobody is really thinking about it, with all the other things there are to think about.
Also, restaurant-style recipes aren’t that unique, any chef worth his salt should be able to come up with something similar. Unless its something really weird, and worth keeping as a trade secret.
Then you don’t tell anyone though.
I worked at a pizza place that shut down, and it never even occurred to anyone. For one thing the owner was obviously stressed out worrying about a bunch of other things, both in the restaurant and in her personal life, and you’d be surprised how much of the food you get at restaurants is really just purchased from a company like Cisco and warmed up for you. We did make the actual pizza from scratch though, and that place had the best crust of any pizza place I’ve ever been too. The problem there was that the recipe was very simple. Just flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, and yeast. That’s it. The trick is the exact ratio, and a proper pizza oven. The oven a recipe can’t help with, and for reasons I don’t understand scaling down recipes, especially in baking, does not produce the same result. A recipe that starts with a 50 pound bag of flour is useless to you, and if you just try to divide all the weights by 100 the end result just isn’t good. All you really know is that you can make good pizza dough with flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, and yeast. That is not exactly shocking news.
a company like Cisco
Networking AND food? What more could you want
Yeah, I had a brainfart there. They’re pronounced the same, but the company I was actually thinking of is spelled Sysco.
and a proper pizza oven. The oven a recipe can’t help with
Fortunately, it sounds like pizza steels do a really impressive job replicating a good oven.
Tell me more about these pizza steels. I know of stone, but a quick google shows me that steels exist, but why steel over stone?
In short, they can hold a lot more heat than the stones, mimicking the effect of professional pizza ovens.
So the idea is to cook a pizza in the shortest possible time in order to thoroughly cook the dough and outer layers, whilst leaving the ingredients with a delightful freshness. With a conventional oven the process takes much longer, tending to cook everything evenly, producing a drier pizza in which you don’t get that ‘brick oven effect.’
I’ve tried the stones myself, heating them on max heat for a whole hour beforehand. They can help a bit, but it’s still not the same. All that’s my take on the situation, anyway.
I checked the FV just now and I don’t see a pizza community here that goes in to this stuff. Unfortunately for now, you’ll have to visit the evil empire for more precise info.
pizzamaking.com is a great old style forum that has more info than the evil empire
I do wish there was an active community for it here too though
Thanks for the tip!
Yes and no. You can get amazing pizza just as good as a proper pizza oven with a pizza steel or a pizza stone if you know what you’re doing and have a good oven, but again there are subtle differences that make it so you can’t just replace one for a large pizza oven with no other adjustments and still get the exact same results.
agree on scale, I’ve never managed to make a small batch of pizza dough taste right, but used to make restaurant batches 20 odd years ago no worries. I have no idea why it works that way
restaurant food is basically normal food with a metric fuckton of butter, sugar, and salt added
Plenty of restaurants source rarer ingredients than your local grocery store and use advanced techniques to create flavor and texture combinations that are hard and time-consuming to do as a home cook. It isn’t simply “add more sugar, fat, and salt.”
How much demand is there for recipes from shut down restaurants? Unless the restaurant had a food that was well known and very popular, the recipes wouldn’t be something that most people would seek out anyway. Even the popular recipes may not be worth publishing as they may take special equipment or access to a supplier that the general public doesn’t have.
Because they’re busy going out of business, I’d imagine. It’s actually a pretty complicated process if you want to avoid a bunch of extra problems down the line. If publishing the recipes helped avoid some of those problems, they might do it. But they’re more likely trying to protect themselves from creditors and get their taxes sorted and final paychecks and selling inventory and equipment and real estate…
Maybe they’re preserving the option to try again with a new restaurant?
Restaurant/chefs do sell menus to other restaurants/bars/chefs, so they may sell that off, but the public would never know about it.
Besides all the other reasons listed. The value of a restaurant is that they feed you with an unique experience. The recipe is not the experience, it’s just a broad guideline. Everyone knows how burgers are made. But I’ve tasted some pretty unique burgers in my life, for which the experience of having eaten would not be possible to replicate even if you had a gram by gram breakdown of the constituent chemicals.
Food like burgers are also 85% technique and 10% equipment. I can’t cook one at home the same I could back I the day in an industrial broiler.
What is the remaining 5%?
The product itself.
In one case in my area, the recipes for their signature dishes died with the family matriarch. :(
Maybe the recipes just weren’t that good, which might have something to do with the restaurant closing.
My favorite Chinese place closed and I’ll never taste that delicious sauce again…
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Accountability I bet
