Day 68 - January 8, 2010

Day 68:

Monday I am in charge of Swiss steaks. They are somewhat similar to a chicken fried steak, but has some differences. Swiss steaks are a cubed steak like a chicken fried steak, but they are only coated in flour when they are browned not egg and flour. Once they are browned they are covered in a bit of gravy, caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms and put to bake for 30 minutes to an hour.

I started the day off by making a brown sauce. I needed a mirepoix cut into a small dice and a sachet. I started by browning my veggies, and by browning them I mean browning them! I think that's the longest I've ever cooked veggies on the stove. I took me a good 30 minutes if not longer. Once they were brown, I had to add my flour to make a roux and then brown my roux. That took a long time as well. The brown veggies and brown roux is what gives the brown sauce it's flavor, just like gumbo. When you make gumbo, your roux should be so dark, it's close to black. That's the authetic flavor of it. Anyway once that part was finished I added it to my beef stock and was able to go work on something else. The sauce was left to simmer for a couple hours to let it reduce and thicken.

After that I got some help and we started trimming the fat off eye of rounds. What an annoying process! I needed to do it as carefully as possible because I was doing a yield test at the same time. I needed to end up with less than 23% waste once all the fat and silver skin was cut off. The silver skin was covering the entire slab of meat and was way hard to get off without taking off a bunch of meat as well.

After spending a ton of time working on it, Blake (a high school kid) came in and I asked him if he wanted to help us trim the 3rd slab of meat. He said okay and 20 minutes later handed it to me perfectly clean! Apparently he worked in a butcher shop and I had chosen the right person to help me. He sped up the process considerably! He was in the process of making french onion soup and flavoring his stock so I offered a switch. I would flavor his stock if he finished trimming mine! He agreed and we switched jobs. He went way faster and I got his stock flavored. When we were finished trimming we sliced them into 1" steaks and then ran them through the cuber machine. It mechanically tenderizes the meat and gives it that distinct cubed steak look.
After we had them all finished I added up my loss numbers and I passed my yield test with ... 21.6% waste!! I was so excited that I didn't have to do it with that type of meat again!

After that I put the meat into the walk in and was ready for lunch on Monday.