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.