There are far, far better cooking examples out there.
There are far, far better cooking examples out there.
I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.
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.
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight to hell.
CBF with having to travel a bull up here when a dewar goes in the boot of my car.
This is likely some food thing I don't know about rather than a quite large piece of paper yeah?
But when I google "A1 food":
- AI summary: "A1 is a famous Malaysian food brand known for herbal soups and instant noodles"
- top link is "A1 Nutrition Lean Protein Blend Dry Dog Food 15kg"
At this point, I don't know what is going on.
That's almost as long as Australia has been colonised and certainly older than Australian federation and yet, A1 steak sauce is not a big thing in our supermarkets apparently.
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:
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
Knowing really is half the battle.
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.
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.
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…
This is why sous vide is such a popular way to cook chicken. You can hold a breast at 145 for hours trivially.
In particular, I use 135F for 90 minutes (75 minimum recommended) to pasteurize eggs that I am going to be putting into something that asks for "raw" eggs (egg nog, mayonnaise, etc.) that I will serve to other people (if it's just for myself, I'll probably just be lazy and use the raw egg). So far, nobody has noticed any difference from "raw".
165 is a rough rule of thumb, not some magic number like the boiling point of water at 1 bar or something.
It's not entirely a myth; if you've poked hundreds of steaks by the same supplier, same cuts, same grade, you'll eventually get a feel for them.
The thermometer analogy does carry over though. Some people are not there to be productive or good at their jobs. The job is about them, not their work.
And you can go your whole life without ever cooking or tasting a good steak. The people who can tell the difference will go elsewhere, and those who can't will come back.
And then there's always the boss who wishes he started a franchise but will go with what he has - he'll hire a bunch of newbies or foreign workers who know how to use a thermometer.
[1] https://amazingribs.com/ratings-reviews/best-thermometers/ho...
I can certainly tell the difference between a good steak and a bad one.
I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo
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!
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.
Really, I get it, even bad pizza is still pizza.
Unsurprisingly my interests are very color-dominant (design, art, fashion) and I do not care for anything where smell matters (wine, coffee, flowers).
Additionally, if you mess up a really good steak, that's like $30+, whereas if I mess up a pourover, that's ~$20/(340g / grams per cup); a relatively small risk surface.
Personally, I think if you actually like coffee, most of it should be drinkable, and the really great cups with rare beans that sit on the margins can be appreciated occasionally for what they are when fortune prevails. The bottom of the barrel for me is basically anything "second wave" or straight out of a gas station. Even instant coffee and McDonalds isn't as bad a place that has "Java" in the name or claims to have "gourmet" coffee. Older Italian places often fall into this, because (some) tend use the absolute cheapest Robusta beans with the harshest darkest roast profiles. Robusta tends to be the most rubbery burnt tire tasting crap out there.
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.
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.
Dialling in espresso isn’t simply a matter of finding the right grind setting on the grinder and locking it in. One coffee may pour a perfect 9 bar espresso and then a different coffee might gush like a shower head and spray sour, weak coffee all over the place, while a third coffee could jam up like squeezing water out of a stone, with barely a drop of extremely bitter liquid falling in the cup, all on the same grind setting!
In other words, every batch of coffee beans needs to be dialled in separately, and there can also be a lot more adjustments needed than simply the grind (water temperature and brew ratio are big factors as well). An expert will know how to adjust at least those 3 variables (grind, temperature, ratio) all in concert to get the most out of a particular coffee. On top of all that, the true master can make use of grinder type (burr design) pressure, flow, and even temperature profiling to fully customize a shot, but that’s going far into the weeds.
I, on the other hand, have a pretty good nose and I can pick out peach, raspberry, toasted nuts, caramel, marshmallow, chocolate, and blueberry notes from a variety of different coffees I’ve bought. The smell of some of these coffees is mesmerizing, like walking into a high end patisserie.
Without that smell component, the coffees taste either sour or bitter or somewhere in between.
I found a 5+ year old half-full bag in the back of the pantry once; that was quite noticeably bad even though I usually can't tell the difference between kinds beyond recognizing that there is some sort of difference.
Once you get that down, zomg - a French press with even the cheapest beans you find can make an amazzzzzing cup of coffee. Beats the pants of Starbucks, and comes quite close to a proper cup of coffee made with good beans. Another trick is to rotate your cheap beans, instead of just sticking to your favorite. Dark roast of choice one week, medium the next, and so on. By the time you loop back to your favorite, it'll taste unbelievable.
It's not so much work with the right tool: I have a button on my kettle that does exactly that, and another button that will use a little thermostat to keep it warm. Works great.
https://www.sageappliances.com/en-gb/product/bke825?sku=SKE8...
Pumpkin spice lattes.
Personally I prefer a light or medium roast over an Italian or French roast, but many people disagree
"Boiling" differs in temperature from place to place.
Mineral content of water, altitude makes a large difference.
According to CGPT at 1km altitude the boiling temperature of water is 96.7 C.
Some very populated cities are above 2km, many are above 1km, and most great coffee is grown ~>=2km. Water hardness and flavour is a big deal as well.
That actually depends on the coffee. Pouring 99C+ water onto light roasted coffee is perfectly fine in most cases and will actually extract more.
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.
"Your job is to not mess up."
Also applicable to any corporate job.
To get good steak you don't need USDA Prime dry-aged steak. You just need USDA choice, picked for a bit of marbling, salted the day beforehand and dried out uncovered in the fridge, then a ripping hot heat source (grill or cast iron etc) to get a good sear on the outside (reverse or not) and a thermometer to hit medium rare on the inside.
Even a modest steak made this way tastes better than a prime steakhouse steak that was doused with salt right before cooking, where you're going to get hypertension immediately yet the meat tastes weirdly unflavorful.
To extend this analogy further, consider making BBQ brisket Texas style. Brisket is a cheap cut of tough, fatty meat. The input quality matters even less there, and it's all dependent on chef skill. Same thing with sourdough bread — 4 ingredients, all outcome depends on skill.
Source: we make an app that teaches people how to cook (https://parsnip.ai)
You're arguing against a strawman on your other points since I didn't make a generalization about all cooking and wouldn't have listed sourdough or brisket in the analogy.
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.
That simple process, suggested by Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT cto) in the modernist cuisine, produces a filet better than most restaurants.
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
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.
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.
It's the deep frying for the sear.
Not many people are willing to deep fry in their kitchens. It's messy, potentially dangerous, and not only stinks up the entire house for days but leaves a layer of oil over everything in the home that builds up and you can never really fully remove.
There's a reason restaurants have massive powerful vents above the deep fryer, and that people who regularly deep-fry at home do it outdoors.
- Meat thermometer (you should own one anyway, keeps you from under/over cooking chicken) - Sixpack cooler (again, very common to own one, very cheap to buy 2nd hand) - gallon sized freezer bag (probably costs about $0.05-0.10 depending on how big of a box you buy) - Cast iron pan (can probably get one for $5 2nd hand or just use a normal stainless steel)
No oven needed which means you can make this with a single electric hotplate.
Exactly. Outback and Chilis has awful steak, but that explains the steak cooking advice here. Mortons is probably the best chain restaurant steak in the US. Texas Roadhouse for a cheaper almost-as-good version, but still far and away better than Outback
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.
Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any half decent steakhouse.
Meat where the salt is just on the surface, vs. meat where the salt has fully penetrated, is like night and day.
What in the world are you guys in this thread doing to steak? Absolute blasphemy. Costco steak? ziplock bags? drowning it in warm water? deep frying in corn oil? meat thermometers?
Steak is not this complicated. The important part is the meat itself. Find a decent butcher (preferably one that dry-ages) or use a grocery store's butcher cuts over stuff they bulk package. Also, ribeyes (bone-in but if not still ribeye), other cuts are for steak and egg omelets.
Lightly salt (or season, oil, dry-rub, etc); Pan sear, preferably blue steel cookware; then broil.
Don't stab the meat with a meat poker...after cooking enough steaks the same way one can simply tell what temperature is. Ask me to cook anything else outside steak and eggs and I will absolutely butcher it, but steak deserves better than ziplock bags and deep frying
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.
Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal posts...
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?
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.
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.
My criteria: When you can drop this car at a random spot on earth (where cars can actually go of course) and tell it to go to place B. So this can be anywhere from a big city to a small dirt road in the forest.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Further, they don't just accept what each of those H.I.s does on their first try. The most visible example is when the H.I. actors don't act exactly as the director wants, they retake the scene. But, the same is true of all the rest. As the "director" they "direct" each of those H.I.s toward their vision.
IT seems similar for coding with an LLM. I become the director. I direct the LLM. I check it's results and if they are unacceptable I re-take with instruction on how to do things closer to what I actually want.
I'm looking at you, Guillermo del Toro.
A director can assume the camera person will push back if a shot is unusable. An LLM will cheerfully hand you something that compiles, looks polished in the demo path, and quietly fails on the cases you didn't spell out. Retakes help, but only if you already know which frames are wrong.
That's the part of the steak essay that lands for me: the machine will follow a recipe at scale. Judging "this is charcoal dressed as medium-rare" is still on you.
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.
isn't it just a word for "making food", so would include grilling as well?
No need to bring it up to room temp. No need to let it rest after. No need to do anything except those two steps. It’s recommended for 2” thick steaks, and you can go under by half an inch easily, but this can be a little rough on very thin steaks.
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.
interesting, because if you want a steak medium rare in France you order it "au point", "at the point"
>Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master... and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes
but discovery (or rediscovery?) of reverse searing was just a few short years ago.
"not spreading infection between patients is easy, just wash your hands" was a huge discovery, not an "oh, everybody knows that"
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".
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"
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.
It’s not surprising people on HN find it easy because attention to detail is rewarded in this community/its employers. But common here and common are different beasts.
Most people or even restaurant don't let their meat outside nor use an actual hot pan.
Until I moved to Taiwan. I truly can’t understand how no one can make a steak. From the garbage pale meat glue “night market steaks” to expensive restaurants. Every steak I’ve had here is a complete disappointment. Even when they supposedly use top-quality US prime or Japanese Wagyu, even when the inside looks pink and not burned to a crisp, it’s always total dogfood quality. They often emulate the right look: pink interior, char on the outside, shiny tallow. But something is off. I never feel like I’m chewing a piece of steak. More like grinding tasteless muscle protein into paste with my teeth.
I don’t even know how it’s wrong sometimes. I look at it and just know that something is wrong that I wouldn’t even know how to replicate, becayse cooking a decent steak is easy to me.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how to unfuck AI, but I reckon 600 watts won't provide enough inference capacity.
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.
Some people just want to _cook the steak_.
They don't want to attend or understand to cuts, thermometers, and searing.
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.
is it rare, medium-rare, medium, well-done?
i think it is subjective.
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 way undersells what's actually happening: fecal matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This shouldn't happen with proper practices.
Proper butchering SHOULDN'T spread the contents of the digestive tract on the large muscles.
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.
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.
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.)
Anyhoo.
k.
I'm entitled to my opinion, which I self-described as a bad hot take.
Sounds like you're the one specifically reprimanding me here? Oops...
Maybe we can chat again after recess is over?
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.
It might be more impressive, but I don't see how reverse sear is cheating.