Cube Steak Machine

From Philip Preston's lab to the kitchens of boundary-pushing chefs

It’s rare that when someone describes meat as “melt-in-your-mouth,” it actually does. But the turkey I ate a few Sundays back came pretty close. Same for the flank steak and short ribs, cuts not typically known for their tenderness. For dessert, there were made-on-the-fly frozen creme anglaise lollipops with just-picked rosemary sprigs stepping in for the sticks.

Philip Preston, the creator of this delicious afternoon “snack” as he referred to it, is not a chef. But he does test recipes and he spends so much time in restaurant kitchens that culinary trendsetters, including Grant Achatz, Thomas Keller and Wylie Dufresne, have him on speed dial.

Preston is, among many other things (more on those later), president of Niles-based PolyScience, a company that creates and supplies the country’s most innovative restaurants with high-tech equipment, some of which were used to create the meal I ate and the reason why I was at his Winnetka home.

I first met Preston six years ago when I stumbled upon his tiny booth at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago. I was hooked immediately, not only by his cool gadgets but also his passion and gee-whiz attitude.

Each year since, I’ve stopped by his booth, which has grown steadily in size and range of equipment.

“Everything about the preparation of food involves science,” he told me at our first meeting. “Even the Italian grandmother who’s been creating wonderful meals has been practicing science, perhaps without even knowing it.”

Chefs came calling

Preston and PolyScience haven’t always been so interested in what goes on in restaurant kitchens. Founded in 1963, the company was originally an importer of German laboratory equipment.

In the early ’70s, PolyScience started manufacturing its own temperature-control equipment, which is used to help create liquid products ranging from motor oil to paint and also is used in DNA labs. (PolyScience built the unit that tested O.J. Simpson’s glove.)

“Temperature control is touching you everywhere,” Preston says.

That’s probably where the company would have stayed if it hadn’t been for a phone call eight years ago from Matthias Merges, then the chef de cuisine at Charlie Trotter’s. The Lincoln Park restaurant was interested in using their immersion circulators for sous vide cooking, a gentle, low-temperature technique in which vacuum-sealed ingredients are cooked slowly in water.

Cube Steak Machine

Cube Steak Machine enables us to enjoy our favorite tender, flavorful cube steaks. It was distributed by R.H. Wolfe in 1941. The cube steak machine comprises of dozens or hundreds of knives to cut and pierce the tough, round meat. It then leaves the cube-shaped imprints on the surface of meat. Cube steaks are passed through the machine at least once or twice to become tender.

There are various models and features of modern-day cube steaks. Some cube steak machines are built like a tank, that is, made of cast iron with thick coating of enamel paint. It also has a nylon base and can be attached to the table through its two clamps.

Customers do not have to purchase their own cube steak machine; they can just visit their butcher or any meat shop, purchase a round steak and ask the butcher to pass it through the cube steak machine. Voila! Cube steak ready to be cooked, plus it you are assured that it’s genuine round steak not scrap of meat knitted together.

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