Comment by MostlyStable
7 hours ago
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.
A steak is hard because the processes to make it are physically contradictory (crust vs interior). Its hardness is a microcosm for why cooking in general is hard. There is a profound value in that, in that if you can handle a single steak (to some standard of satisfaction) then you will have the general skills to handle recipes involving even more steps. It becomes a reduction argument. It is true that the more moving parts/steps/interactions a dish involves the hardness grows combinatorially. But that is logistical hardness, e.g. managing the complexity of a flavor profile. Soon that amount of multiplication/permutations escapes the realm of any one human being to handle.