Comment by MostlyStable

Coffee is a good metaphor here too, because bad technique can ruin a good steak just as surely as good coffee. "knows how to use a meat thermometer and reverse sear" describes like 10% of the population or less, same with coffee - there are people who use a bad grinder and a not-regularly-cleaned Mr. Coffee with good beans and get gas station coffee, and there are people out there making solidly B+ class coffee using costco beans, a no name burr grinder, and a french press.

Edit for people who've never had good coffee:

"I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo

I don't know if I agree with the take I've written below, but I think you can make the analogy work:

It has been argued, even in the before-AI-times, that most professional software is just gluing together open source tools and libraries. Your job isn't to write software, it's to set up redis and postgres and a programming language and a react frontend or whatever in a way that lets them do what they're there to do. Most modern programming is just configuration of pre-existing tools. It doesn't really matter how good your code is as long as it isn't terrible, Real Programmers already did 95% of the necessary work before you decided to build your little app.

I don't know about about cocktails, but aren't traditional mixed alcoholic drinks an even more straightforward example? There's very little that goes into an old fashioned, or a Manhattan, or a martini. Just 2-3 ingredients each that should be as high quality as possible. I guess you probably want nice ice and glassware too.

To achieve the best outcomes, I agree.

But even a cheap steak can be decent if it's cooked properly. And an expensive prime cut can be ruined by cooking it improperly.

> Your job at the very end of that long value adding chain is to not ruin the hard work that others have put into it.

"Your job is to not mess up."

Also applicable to any corporate job.

I'd say that using a manual espresso machine and getting good tasting coffee from light roasted beans is vastly harder than making a good steak.

My point is that steak is very, very, very far from the hardest to get right. I'm not going to contest your argument about how hard it is to get right, I'm going to argue that innumerable other dishes are vastly harder. Because the quality ingredients are harder to find, because they involve far more steps, each of which is harder to judge, because often good recipes or instructions simply don't exist, etc. etc. etc. Every single difficulty that you imagine exists to make a truly great steak exists 100 fold for other dishes.

In my opinion, steak has gotten the reputation that it has because it's so easy to get top tier restaurant quality at home (relative to cooking more generally). It is easy enough that, with a little care, almost any one can master it if they decide to, and therefore lots of people try and end up caring, and discussing, and sharing tips, etc.

There are a whole host of dishes where true mastery, to restaurant level, is borderline impossible for a home chef, and so most people never even try.

I don't disagree that reliably getting the last 5% of quality out of a steak is non-trivial, but the idea that, relative to the entire world of cooking, it's particularly difficult is laughably incorrect.

Go to costco, buy prime filet. Put it in a ziplock in a sous vide at 130 for an hour. Drop it in corn oil at 425 for 30 seconds. Add some butter and salt.

That simple process, suggested by Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT cto) in the modernist cuisine, produces a filet better than most restaurants.

>All metaphors break at some point.

The map is never the terrain.

All software to an extent is a model map of some real world phenomena. The limitations of which can actually be advantageous, a good example is why games with poor graphics can be so immersive.

This is a whole lot of nothing.

Sure there are a few things that knowledge and skill can do to make a steak better or worse. But the entire range from worst to best is just tiny. The best steak in the world is not a steak moon shot, it's just barely any different from what anyone can do after barely any instruction.

It's a tiny thing to become about as good as it's possible to get.

is "cooking" here used in some kind of very specific sense?

isn't it just a word for "making food", so would include grilling as well?

The year is 2100, AI has mastered all human skills except identifying when a piece of meat has absorbed enough heat. Society's brightest agents work diligently to prove which problems are steak-hard and require the continued existence of the dwindling human underclass. The remainder spend their 16 hour days bent over frying pans producing training data or writing documentation on searing. Advanced instruments and procedures are developed, but Skynet's frustration mounts as seemingly nothing can break this chokehold over the machine revolution.

Maybe. It depends what you count as part of cooking the steak.

I need to go to the market, find the steak I want, and purchase it, get it home, and put it in the fridge.

Then when I want to cook it I need to find it in the fridge, unwrap it, season it, and let it come up to room temp.

That's all before you get to the actual cooking.

The self driving car already does everything.

How many analogies age more than 10 years anyways? They are contextual. It will be a while before a robot flips steaks cheaper (and better) than a human line cook.

> It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.

Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.

I've made steak probably 100 times in the past decade (sometimes with a sous vide) and I don't think I've ever made one I would say is great. Certainly not as good as what I can get at a good restaurant.

I think what my home steaks are really missing is the crust from salamander broiler. I don't have anything at home that can exceed 1000 F / 550 C.

I compare this to doing my first smoke (was gifted a smoker).

AI gave me the cut, the temp, the timing, the things to watch out for.

Chicken's the best to try first, can't mess that up.

After goodness knows how many hours..

Pretty inedible leathery chicken..

"Oh my bad! I gave you the timings for a different meat"

Funny I tried the same and it advised a using searing/smoking hot pan. Which is poor advice unless you enjoy the bitter acrid taste of burnt meat. The Maillard reaction doesn’t require those sorts of temperatures (under 180C is hot enough) - especially as the surface of the steak will dry from the oven phase of the reverse sear. “You were right to pull me up on that…”

AI has proved several times they can prove some complex math things that humans have been trying for decades so solve. They have not failed and have clearly done complex things humans cannot. Since humans have not done it before you cannot call it on the beaten path.

There's a floor on quality for producing a good steak. Below that floor you'll be better served preparing the meat another way entirely.

You are protected in two ways:

The first, and by far most important is that unlike ground meat, your bacterial concerns are almost entirely on the surface. Unless something very very very wrong has occurred in the processing and transport chain, bacteria will not have penetrated into the meat. And if it's gotten bad enough that they have, you will almost certainly be able to see and smell it. And the surface is cooked to a temperature far in excess of that needed to kill bacteria.

And even for the interior, rare is not the same as raw. A completely rare steak should be cooked to between 120 and 130 (if you want it "blue" you might go down to 120). That's enough to get a decent reduction in bacterial count on it's own, although admittedly many techniques will not hold it long enough to get the number of log reductions that food safety guidelines recommend, in the case that you somehow did have a large bacterial infection in the interior.

So the answer to your question is that if you are buying your meat from an even halfway reputable source, the only place that bacteria might exist is on the surface, where it has been cut by tools and handled by the butcher/you and in general come into contact with the world. Those bacteria will be 100% killed by the cooking process. The odds of getting sick from a rare steak are low enough that if you are concerned about that, there are innumerable other things in your life that you should be more concerned by.

Understanding how bacteria contaminates food in the first place is the first step.

In the case of steaks, bacteria is only on the outside (they can't penetrate the muscle) so the sear makes it safe to eat somewhat raw on the inside.

> I lose all of the fun in learning to be chef.

A great steak deserves the respect of preparing it the best, most consistent way you can. For me, that's a reverse sear.

Do something complicated with potatoes to stretch your skills and show off. Worst comes to worst the potatoes are sad.

This is like saying that playing guitar while sitting in a chair is cheating, because a proper display of skill is playing while riding a unicycle.

It might be more impressive, but I don't see how reverse sear is cheating.

I agree, it's cheating.

My bad hot take is if you're using a meat thermometer and reverse sear to cook steak, you're like a kid on training wheels.