I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy. Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master/make at a top level quality at home. Does it require some modicum of attention and understanding? Sure. But starting with a high quality cut, owning a meat-thermometer, and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes to reliably and easily get a near perfect steak every time.
There are far, far better cooking examples out there.
I'm more of a coffee nerd than a steak aficionado but I've often made the comparison between those two. In both cases, the enthusiast considers their skill in making coffee/cooking steak to be a differentiator and they immerse themselves deeply into the process, skills, and tools. But for both coffee beans and steak the most important factor for a good end product is starting with high quality inputs. In other words, most of the work is being done by the farmers, the processors, and the quality of the raw stock (the cow or the coffee plant). 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.
I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.
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 know people who can cook a lot of food pretty well, but don't understand why they can't use a laser thermometer to check their meat.
Knowing really is half the battle.
What I've really gotten out of this is that I'd like to learn how to use a (proper) meat thermometer when I make steaks.
The funny part is steak is one of the easiest foods to cook without a thermometer
You don’t have to worry about undercooking like you do with most other meats and most steak cuts will be delicious anywhere from 11-130 (if you cook a filet to 130, it won’t be the best but it’ll still be good) and some can go even higher
It’s not like poultry where the range where it’s “good” is very small. A 170 chicken breast is almost inedible and 160 is not safe…
I agree with your broader point but the chicken food safety thing is missing a ton of important nuance. The safety comes from how long you hold the meat at the temp. 165 is the safe point if you are only holding for 10s. 145 is safe if you hold it for 10 minutes.
This is why sous vide is such a popular way to cook chicken. You can hold a breast at 145 for hours trivially.
Since this is HN, here's the maximum technology option: https://combustion.inc/
They have a thermometer with multiple sensors in it that finds the core temperature of the food you're cooking automatically, and predicts the rise in temperature over time. So the alarm goes off when it's time to pull and rest, which is absolutely amazing.
I have one of the Combustion thermometers, and I like it. I used it more than I expected. In particular, I use it for roasting chicken and for sous vide things more than anything else. Then I got a Breville Control Freak, and I used it much less. :)
For maximum techyness, Combustion, Inc. correctly identified that sous vide is normally an overdamped system. If you follow their instructions you can increase the water temp some and then bring it back down in order to move the system closer to critically damped and speed up your sous vide.
They have digital thermometers now that will map out the temperature curve and even predicted when the meat will reach core temp. You really don't need to use them many times before you internalize the behavior.
If you cook enough you can tell by feel
Ok, using a laser thermometer for food is hilarious. Thanks for this xD
It's not wrong for all food, surface temperature measurement has its place, you just have to understand it is surface measurement.
It is reasonable for measuring cooking environment. Like say pizza oven. Just have to be aware of things like right emissivity.
I use it to spot check the temp of my cast iron pan all the time.
for a caramel or some sauces it's legit
Perhaps I'm crazy, but I truly can't taste much of a difference between "good" coffee and "bad" coffee.
I can certainly tell the difference between a good steak and a bad one.
You'll start to taste the difference once you get that one really-well-made pourover at a place that _lives_ for the love of coffee.
There are some coffee beans that have crazy taste profiles when properly extracted with the right water. I had one that tastes literally like a peach and another that tasted like a really nice tea.
Or maybe not. Different strokes!
So I can taste differences, but they simply don't matter enough for me. My areopressed coffee with nice fresh locally roasted beans does taste different from a mcdonalds pot. Less harsh, less chemically flavored. But for me those differences don't really matter. They are close enough that I can enjoy both.
But I would say I know I'm also weird in that food temp really doesn't bother me all that much. I enjoy my coffee even as it goes from hot to cold.
A steak for me can be more easily messed up. But then I've not tried instant coffee so maybe I've just never tasted the bottom of the barrel for coffee.
Same but I’m sure my sense of smell is weaker (or average?). On the other hand, my sense of color differentiation is extremely fine.
Unsurprisingly my interests are very color-dominant (design, art, fashion) and I do not care for anything where smell matters (wine, coffee, flowers).
Yeah Mcdonalds is, at this point, acceptably C-grade coffee. You have to go to something like a cafe bustelo in distilled water to get the full contrast.
Really, I get it, even bad pizza is still pizza.
It’s about experience. If you’re not into classical music, or jazz, or metal, it all sounds the same - how could anybody tell the difference? Only when you put in the work to listen to it a lot, different works, and actually pay attention, you will notice how your sense and understanding develops over time. Suddenly you’re able to make out differences, recognise patterns and repeated segments and structure where before there was none.
Or pick dancing: when you start out, you’re entirely occupied with placing your feet in the right spots at the right time. As you practice, your mind gets freed up and you’re able to make deliberate alterations, embellishments, larger figures. That seems impossible at the start.
Believe me, there's a huge spectrum, from the sweet aroma of freshly ground Brazilian beans to straight up cat piss coffee sold in supermarkets.
No offence, but for some reason some people just can't accept a simple fact: for some people this difference is still not a difference.
I've tried good coffee. At least that's what people told ne on multiple accasions where I was taken to "the right places" in multiple countries. On two sides of the globe (Brazil and Vietnam if we are talking about producers, not to mention countries that import the beans).
Thing is: no matter where it grows, no matter how they prepare it, fermented or not, different frying, different brewing techniques - all the same to me.
I can tell the difference. Some times small, some times very huge. But still for this difference is like a cat piss from some street cat and a cat with a pedigree.
It may have the ideal temperature, ideal acid levels, zinc amounts or whatever - still tastes like cat piss. The fact that it has a pedigree does not make it better.
Tea is whole different story for me though. But I do accepts that people are fine with whatever they love in their "english breakfast tea" or a nameless teabag.
I thought that too, honestly, before I had truly great coffee. I honestly didn't like coffee at all, and then a coworker brought in some coffee he'd roasted and prepared himself and it was lifechangingly good. I also made myself incredibly sick with the enormous amount of caffeine, it's been very rare that I've had to go home from work in the middle of the day but that was one.
That likely means that you've only had "bad" coffee. You're one of today's lucky 10,000 - go treat yourself to a decent cup of coffee it tastes completely different. The difference between a good steak and a bad steak is actually a good comparison.
Sometimes it's a matter of not having taste for it. If you give me multiple bottles of alcohol drinks, I might be able to distinguish them, but I have no clue at all which ones are supposed to be good. To me it's all just alcohol. Same with coffee - but not the same for steak.
Or perhaps they've only had good coffee, so they should try some instant coffee past its use-by date to compare.
Here's an obligatory Tom Scott + James Hoffmann episode:
I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo
I bet the same analogy can be applied to cooking a cucumber.
Pickling a cucumber sure has a lot of resemblance - a great cucumber is good fresh and great pickled, but a bad pickling brine can ruin even a great cucumber.
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 much 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.
> 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.
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.
But the point is that no matter how well you cook the steak you're not creating quality, you're just getting the most out of what you have. The cow and the farmer created that quality. I believe we lose sight of that because so much of the value chain is not visible to us and we hyper fixate on the fun part, becoming a better barista/chef.
Yes. It is about learning all of these things. Knowing what kind of cut you have, and how to treat it to best effect.
A very tough gristly cut can be improved by tenderizing. Going low-and-slow/sous vide to melt the connective tissue. Even grinding it up to make a hamburger steak / loco moco.
Once you know all of those things, choosing the right approach and executing it is not that hard. The steps themselves are simple.
It's this story all over again:
https://engineerine.com/10000-dollar-chalk-mark/
No one with an IQ above room temperature believes that story.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
This story is AI slop
AI slop that has been told for decades. Lol
Any steak can be delicious with a butter bath and then hit it with that A1 :).
> hit it with that A1
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight to hell.
ah, more of an HP person I take it?
Everyone knows steak is better well-done with ketchup.
Why don’t you skip the meat and just make a butter and A1 soup :)
For a moment I thought it is hitting with AI.
No, AI is how you create the steak in the first place, if you have any sense.
CBF with having to travel a bull up here when a dewar goes in the boot of my car.
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.
All metaphors break at some point.
However, your example actually proves the point.
How many people who want a good steak know how to identify a high quality cut? Do they even know where to buy a high quality cut? What the different cuts are and whether they want rump, sirloin or fillet? How many kitchens have a meat thermometer? How many home cooks know how to use it and what the right temperature should be? How many home cooks know about reverse searing? Or timing? Or resting? Or seasoning?
Is it all learnable? Sure. But even something as simple as steak has nuance that needs to be learned, equipment deployed to go from "pretty good" to "great", experimentation and trial and error.
Steak is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.
Building an app is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.
So, honestly, the whole metaphor stands up pretty well for me, specifically because of your response.
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.
Since we're deep enough in this thread where we're talking about steak rather than AI, I'd like to lean into that.
I used to sous-vide a lot. It was certainly great to get perfectly-done steak. but I still didn't love the result and it took me a while to figure out.
Specifically: sous-viding at 130 doesn't reliably render fat. So it's great for a lean filet mignon like your suggesting, but kept giving me rubbery fat in anything with more fat or significant marbling. I eventually switched away from sous-vide (I usually either grill or reverse sear, depending on my effort/time availability) for most cuts these days.
If the problem is that the temperature is too low for the cut, you can just use a higher temp?
Same! Unless I'm doing a filet, I just prefer grilling. Or reverse sear if you don't mind running the oven.
Sure - but you shouldn't be running a ribeye, as an example, at 130. Run it at 138 for 4 hours.
The internet loves using 137 for Ribeyes for the reason you said. I've had good luck going with 135 for ~4 hours.
You leave it unseasoned until the end?
For a filet for 1 hour, you can sort of do what you want. I add a tiny bit of olive oil and salt, but not much. If you start going longer times with the sous vide, you can get different reactions so you have to be more careful.
a filet better than most restaurants.
Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any half decent steakhouse.
Sous vide is fool proof, you cant mess it up. All you have to worry about is the sear, and that's easy too.
That "simple process" requires equipment most people don't own or know how to operate, an oil most people don't keep in their cupboards, and is suggested in a book most people haven't heard of by a tech CTO they would not recognise the name of.
Honestly this is like the Dropbox comment all over again. Everyone is missing the point, it's glorious. :)
Most people cooking steaks don't care about the optimal way to cook steaks, or want to find out.
Most people building software today don't care about the optimal way to build software, or want to find out.
That's TFA. That's the point. That's what we're discussing. :D
I used to sous vide steak in college with just some hot water and my roommate's six-pack cooler. Water should be no more than 5F warmer than the cook temp. For a medium rare steak, cook temp is 129F so get close that. Salt the steak no more than an hour before you start. Steak goes into a Ziploc bag, submerge it up to the zipper to let water pressure force out the air and then seal it shut. Close the lid and come back in an hour, two hours if it's a thicker steak. Take it out of the bag, blot it with a paper towel, apply some steak seasoning, and toss it on a pan at the hottest temperature you can make it. Wait 3 minutes and flip, wait another 3 minutes and serve immediately. Toss a pat of butter on top while in the pan if you're a hedonist.
Only prerequisites are a cheap kitchen thermometer, a ziploc gallon bag, and a cheap cooler. Everything is available at your typical supermarket or even goodwill. This is a very hands off cooking method and requires no experimentation, just follow the recipe and you get a perfect steak every time.
The key is that a cooler holds hot things just as well as cold things but without a circulator and heater to keep the water warm, you're at the mercy of the cooler's R-value. The water will eventually get too cold to effectively cook the meat so you're limited in the length of time you can sous vide. Doing a 24 hour chuck roast is simply not going to work unless you're refilling the cooler every couple hours.
Why wouldn't you have corn oil?
Where I live corn was never used for producing oil. For that purpose we used rapeseed/canola, sunflowers, olives and pumpkin seeds. Corn grown here is mostly used for corn flour, cornmeal (polenta), or for animal feed.
Corn oil is cheap and available at costco. A sous vide is a fancy french name for a $150 device from target that keeps water at a specific temperature...
This "simple process" is much, much simpler than most meals one cooks at home. It's not much harder than microwaving something.
You are missing the point. With a small change in the way you do something, the really good thing can be made.
Sous vide are even cheaper now, $30 for a basic one, provided you've got a stock pot or something large enough to set it in.
You need something to vacuum seal the food. Is that included in the $30?
That can be just a ziplock bag and the same water bath you're going to use for the sous vide anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZPLF0ezw8nn
you really don't for most things. Ziplock is fine for things that take an hour or two.
I read corn oil while I expect 3 star Michelin steak. What are we talking about oO
Reminds me of recipes like brining a turkey in Dr Pepper... sure it may taste fine, but I'd rather not eat food prepared in plastic bags with processed oil.
Then don't go to a good restaurant. Sous vide is extremely common, and oils of various types are used liberally.
Yeah, that's (one of the reasons) why eating out frequently is unhealthy.
The discussion is about a good steak....
Steakhouses, and most restaurants, do not sous vide the meat. It takes too long.
Many do. They don't start when you order....
>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.
So, once you've used your knowledge to make several important pre-task decisions, the task is easy? Pre task decisions that a layperson would accidentally make implicitly because they don't even know to ask, which will probably result in them still not enjoying their steak despite having nominally done the task itself correctly?
Imagine someone walking into their local grocer, grabbing a prepackaged porterhouse steak (because it's fancy right?), salt and pepper (because for a good steak that's all you need, right) and then wondering why part of it tastes bland and overdone, and the other part bland and under-done.
Sounds pretty analogous imo.
I wonder if something is lost to translation. Cooking a stake could be the simple act of putting the steak in the oven with basically zero seasoning with a thermometer and then wait until medium rare with some optional searing. It could also mean trim the meat, cut into slices, seasoning, and frying/grilling them to each persons personal taste, which include well-done.
Perfect grilled steak, especially well-done, is something I find very few people have the experience or skills to do well, especially over a coal grill where the heat won't be constant and the person also need to first have good experience in making a good and even coal bed.
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?
I also don't think the analogy will age well.
It might take more than 10 years, but robots will almost certainly master cooking single pieces of meat.
It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.
Sure, for probably quite a long time you'll be able to find someone who can cook a way better steak than the best robot, especially because taste is extremely subjective...
You can debate the horizon and the extent, but changes ARE coming.
Change is the only thing you can count on besides death.
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.
> Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.
Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal posts...
Is it moving the goalposts to ask Waymo to demonstrate a drive across America and not in well mapped cities with only lower speeds? How did we define "self driving"?
No True Scotsman only drives in the city. All True Scotsmen drive across the entire U.S. of A.
Waymo has completed 20 MILLION autonomous rides, 6.5m last quarter alone...
At what point does it get to say it can self-drive? When there's not a single non-self-driven car left on the road?
>drive across the entire U.S. of A.
I'm still working on collecting the drive to all states badge. I've only accomplished half. I calculated my total driving since getting a license recently and its approx. ~360k miles or around 17k miles a year.
If Waymo can eventually handle rural life in the US I'd be seriously impressed.
It's not going to for a long time because the cost/benefit isn't there...
Even if Waymo's healthy growth rate continues, it won't make up 5% of the entire US rideshare market until 2030.
That's still several years away from ever even thinking about rural areas.
Agreed. I'm an avid cook. Sous vide circulators are cheap now, and so are meat thermometers. Doing a steak well is one of the easiest cooking tasks, to the extent that I won't bother paying top dollar in a restaurant because it's so easy to do restaurant quality at home. I could teach someone to cook a restaurant quality steak in a couple hours and a few practice runs.
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.
There's so much written about how to cook a steak well, and I've tried a lot of exotic techniques (I have gas and charcoal grills, tried cooking straight on a chimney starter, have gas torches inside and outside). Most of what really matters is that it's dry, the pan is heavy and hot, you use enough oil to get good heat transfer.
If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.
There's really not much to it? Stick it in a low oven and bring it just under temp, then finish it in a ripping pan. If the results you're getting from that aren't restaurant-caliber, it's probably the meat you're buying. You definitely do not need 550C to put an excellent crust on a steak!
Salamander broiler would be incredible to have at home. We get decent results from using a cast iron pan thats as hot as we can get it. At most we can sear 2 steaks as it tends to cool off pretty quick even under high heat. Got any better alternatives that a home cook could use?
I've tried a blowtorch and a barbecue, but they're not as good as cast iron. Best results from just spending $15 on a second cast iron.
Are you just heating the bare cast iron to crazy hot temperatures and then putting the steak in?
I've thought about trying that, but I'd need to first strip the seasoning off the pan to avoid all kinds of nasty flavors. The second pan makes sense...
Reverse sear over sous vide -- moisture is the enemy of crust.
Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal can get to 650°F or so pretty quick, and does an amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.
A blow torch might be worth trying. I'd think it's still not as good as a hot broiler because it's heating a relatively small area.
As noted in an earlier comment of mine, I have one (actually made for burning weeds) connected to my gas grill tank, and a fancy Japanese one inside. They're honestly pretty rinky-dink. What they are good at is transferring heat just to the crust. But they only do a small patch at a time, and you have to hover for far longer than you'd think. Like, you do a little patch, leave the torch there for 30 seconds, move on. They just don't pump enough energy into the crust fast enough for them to be a general solution. I use them for touching things up, or crisping up a bit.
You tried an actual hardware blowtorch. Thats never failed me, though these days I just finish on a ripping hot stainless steel skillet.
I feel like I am better off with cast iron or stainless steel compared to slightly bigger torch. Stainless steel allowing some deglazing for sauce. Torch is still too small area and burns more so sears.
couldn't you trivially get a kitchen torch or use your oven's broiler
I haven't had good luck with either. The torch may have been a skill issue but the broiler just doesn't get hot enough. Mine taps out at 550 F.
French fries are much harder to get right, for example.
it reminds me that making a ring is not rocket science https://youtube.com/shorts/NPKOGqXKLq4
I can’t confirm the quote online but I remember Julia Child saying in one of her shows that it’s easy to make a good omelette and almost impossible to make a great omelette.
"Omelet" is the right (and classic) analogy here.
Just to add my favorite fool-proof method to the others already listed here.
A meat probe and the 30-second flip technique is a stupid-easy way to a perfect steak every time. Just make sure you've got great ventilation. Also salt the meat 1 hour before.
Prime with good marbling + sous-vide makes it easy for beginners to match steaks from the best steakhouses.
Reflecting on the matter with a colleague -
Some people just want to _cook the steak_.
They don't want to attend or understand to cuts, thermometers, and searing.
Agreed. With steak, the main point is to let the quality of the meat speak for itself. Too much input from the cook and you just get in the way of this.
I was just curious asked chatgpt:
How can I make a really great steak myself? What to look out for, what to do. Give me detailed instructions.
I got a really good answer (including - cut, temperature and reverse searing), so I probably won't even need understanding. (Oh - and yes, I can cook - the answer mirrors what I already know).
Yes, it was a very, very poor analogy, because cooking a steak is a well known and well documented thing where LLMS produce good output. They fail when you get off the beaten path and try to do something that's not "mainstream".
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"
While smoked turkey (from Reese bros) is easily the best poultry I've ever had, I certainly would not call poultry the best place to start learning smoking.
In general I'd recommend starting with the most forgiving meat available to you (IMO pork butt or shoulder are great options) as even when you don't hit the ideal cook you often still get enjoyable results. Repeating the process enough times to learn how to dial in a cook is much easier when the misses don't suck.
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.
The problem is that not everyone can afford/wants to spend on a high quality cut. A good cook can make a cheap cut of meat taste great. There's no single right way of cooking a steak and that can include spices/herbs/marinades/oils/etc.
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.
> I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy.
He may have missed the point.
AI-generated code does not seem to have parsimony, for one. Generating code is cheap, so there's no drive to condense it. LLMs are not yet good at formulating abstractions to make code smaller, leading to code bloat. It's the same phenomenon that appears when humans modify code they only partially understand by adding special cases to general code.
There are complaints about "elegance", but it's more useful to talk about parsimony. Code bloat is measurable. Elegance is hard to assess.
Now it's steak, tomorrow it can be pasta, next year it can be watermelon kimchi.
And salting overnight :)
It is a great analogy, as the vast majority of software tasks are CRUD or glue logic. At this point, relatively narrowly-defined tasks are a solved problem with frontier models. It is only more advanced tasks with broad scope and large context that frontier models have more limited results.
hehe I always turn mine grey but I have mini bella mushrooms on top
How do you get around the idea of poisoning oneself? Keeping meat part raw feels uneasy.
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.
This is why rare steak is ok, but rare ground beef hamburgers are not. Although less cooked through burgers are sometimes served in restaurants that grind their beef fresh right before cooking
It also doesn't help that the quality of ground beef in the US is much poorer than other countries, so those who may regularly eat rare ground beef internationally would experience a level of shock if eating it in the US.
I mean, rare ground beef hamburgers are pretty much fine too. They have a higher risk of contamination, yes, but that does not make it a particularly high risk. I eat burgers, made from pre-ground beef, cooked rare all the time and I have yet to get sick from it even once.
Great answer. Just to add, this is with red meat where E. Coli is the main concern. That exists in the gut of the animal and that bacteria can travel to the surface of the muscles during the butchering process. Poultry on the other hand is mainly concerned with Salmonella which does live in the muscles of the animal. That's why people aren't ordering rare chicken breast.
Also, rare chicken breast is apparently pretty unpleasant to eat. Kenji Lopez-Alt did an article where he discussed how you can use sous vide to pasteurize chicken while still keeping it at a low temp, but the result (while perfectly safe to eat) was not enjoyable.
"bacteria can travel to the surface of the muscles during the butchering process"
This way undersells what's actually happening: fecal matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This shouldn't happen with proper practices.
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.
Am I the only one who thinks the "reverse sear" is like cheating? It takes out all of the skill when you move from the pan to the oven, and I lose all of the fun in learning to be chef.
> 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.
People are allowed to use tools and non-traditional techniques, even when it feels like cheating. They needn't be chastised for this.
The gestapo isn't going to kick in the door and haul folks away for using reverse-sear and a meat thermometer while they cook a steak in their own kitchen.
(And everyone is free to seek their own kind of masochistic pride, if that behooves them. When a person has better satisfaction [or whatever they get out of it] from doing things the hard way, then that's OK too.)
I'm not chastising anyone, I have no power over them
I'll cheat all day then. If I'm going to spend what a good steak costs, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure I'm not ruining it.
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