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Comment by MerrimanInd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

I use it to spot check the temp of my cast iron pan all the time.

It is reasonable for measuring cooking environment. Like say pizza oven. Just have to be aware of things like right emissivity.

for a caramel or some sauces it's legit

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.

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.

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.

I've had a Combustion thermometer since they came out. The best uses for me are butterflied whole chicken on the grill and roasts in the oven. You can get extremely precise results and account for carry over cooking very easily. Huge leap in results.

Is this company owned by either Chris Young or Kenji Lopez-Alt? A few times I have seen them using this product and promoting it. I am curious if a bunch of influencer chefs decided to create a company to create this product.

AIUI it's owned by Chris, and Kenji is a fan, but doesn't have any ties other than that.

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.

Sure. But then you need a thermometer.

Or understand risk ratios and don't rely on food that's 100% safe.

You can be safe down to 135F if you give it enough time. https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html#Poultry_and_Eggs

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".

160 degrees for a chicken breast is perfectly safe. Considerably lower temperatures can also produce microbiologically safe chicken when combined with sufficient holding time.

165 is a rough rule of thumb, not some magic number like the boiling point of water at 1 bar or something.

If you cook enough you can tell by feel

The resistance of the steak is going to depend on what cut of meat you are poking (sirloin is stiffer than filet), the grade of meat (prime is more tender than select), how thick it is (thick cuts will yield more than thin), the age of the steer (young is more tender), the breed of steer (cooked Wagyu is more tender than Holstein), the age of the meat (wet aged is more tender than fresh killed), and what the steer was fed (corn fed is usually more tender than grass fed), among other things. [1]

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...

Yes, I meant given a similar cut ofc

Not with steak. That has been thoroughly debunked over and over. Just use a meat thermometer, it makes it easy peasy.

If you cook enough you won't even need to.

laser thermometer only measures surface temperature, unlike meat probes that measure internal temp. depending on the cut size or shape, initial temperature and probably some other factors internal temp will vary wildly for the given surface temperature. combustion probes mentioned in the sibling measure temp in several points at once to estimate readings even more precisely.

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.

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.

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

Or perhaps they've only had good coffee, so they should try some instant coffee past its use-by date to compare.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Most people can't will themselves to even drink coffee without sugar and cream to dampen the bitterness. You care enough to make your normal coffee at least quite good, but maybe not enough to obsess beyond that, and that's fine, not everything needs to be a hobby.

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.

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.

All coffee tastes like cigarette ash to me. Similarly, I have been to places that people rave about. My buddy used to run a coffee shop. "Your beans were overcooked"; no, not it. There is something innate to espresso or something. Smells amazing. Tastes like ash.

Good espresso is really difficult to make, with the lighter the roast, the harder it is to get right. Most coffee shops can get good quality beans that smell amazing but without a well-practiced barista the shots will be excessively sour or bitter.

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.

Ash. I am telling you, preparation matters not.

Interestingly, that's many people's experience (including my own) of drinking good coffee with covid. I'm so sorry, is all I can say :(

I honestly fail to understand the relevance of "some people can't tell the difference or just don't care". Good (or not) for them?

Sorry, I don't really understand your question.

Question: how is your sense of smell? My friend has the same opinion about coffee as you (he just drinks cheap diner joe) and his sense of smell is almost nonexistent.

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.

> can't taste much of a difference between "good" coffee and "bad" coffee.

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.

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'd bring the cheapo French press kit it into the A- domain once you appreciate the number one trick to making good coffee: DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below boiling brings out the flavor of the beans a million times more than boiling water. Get a glass kettle, and turn it off when you start to get some decent bubble action on the bottom.

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.

Are you saying that the temperature of the water when it hit the ground beans that matter or the fact that the water was brought up to a boil or 100°C?

The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground beans. I see no reason why you couldn't boil it and then let it cool first.

> The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground beans. You could certainly boil it and then let it cool first, but that'd take a lot of extra work.

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...

Starbucks uses espresso machines that cost 4-5 figures. They have automatic thermal control. They never boil the water. While I agree with your overall sentiment, claiming that Starbucks makes coffee too hot and thus tastes bad is nonsense.

I'm not speculating why Starbucks coffee tastes how it does, I have no idea there. It's just a handy medium for comparison because a cup in Laos is going to taste the same as a cup in NYC. And while they don't make great coffee, they also don't make horrible coffee - and so I think beating Starbucks is a pretty good and understandable baseline to aim for.

I'm from Portugal and we have a strong espresso culture, as in 90% of the people probably have multiple espresso every day. Many Portuguese agree that Starbucks espresso sucks compared to most conventional cafes. At most people go there for the American type drinks, which are a complete different style (and the coffee flavor hides behind all other ingredients, it doesn't have to be that good).

The previous comment didn't say that Starbucks doesn't suck (they probably agree that it does -- I've never met anyone who really likes coffee who doesn't agree that modern at-scale Starbucks is awful), they just asserted that the badness there is not explained by faulty temperature control.

So why does Starbucks coffee still consistently taste like shit?

So you buy their sugary crap to hide the shit coffee.

Pumpkin spice lattes.

The more you roast the beans, the less terroir you taste, so you can use cheaper and less uniform beans. In Starbucks case this has become a brand identity, so it has persisted past strictly practical concerns. Many people dislike the kind of acidity and strange flavors you can get from lighter roasted coffee, at least in the milk drinks they want to sell, and light roasts are also harder to get perfect and consistent, so that is another point against it (or the same through a different lens)

Personally I prefer a light or medium roast over an Italian or French roast, but many people disagree

> DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below boiling

"Boiling" differs in temperature from place to place.

Mineral content of water, altitude makes a large difference.

Not sure this is a meaningful factor for normal circumstances (for example below 1km altitude and for water that's safe to drink).

According to CGPT at 1km altitude the boiling temperature of water is 96.7 C.

> Not sure this is a meaningful factor for normal circumstances (for example below 1km altitude and for water that's safe to drink).

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.

> DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below boiling brings out the flavor of the beans a million times more than boiling water.

That actually depends on the coffee. Pouring 99C+ water onto light roasted coffee is perfectly fine in most cases and will actually extract more.

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 strongly disagree with this on the steak part and maybe the coffee too. Many people pride themselves on buying expensive ingredients and thinking they have the best steak but it actually sucks.

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)

One way to phrase that would be to say that you have a vested interest in supporting the idea that end user skill is more important than ingredients since you sell a means of improving end user skill. Not sure if that's a source or a conflict of interest. I'm not saying cooking a steak is easy or hard, I'm saying that you are not creating quality when you cook a steak; the maximum attainable quality is capped by the ingredient. It's like the "I made this" meme.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why don’t you skip the meat and just make a butter and A1 soup :)

This sounds like A1 slop to me.

> hit it with that A1

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.

A1 steak sauce. Been around for 195 years, hence the GP didn't feel the need to expand.

...doing more research...

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.

Maybe HP / brown sauce. Would be familiar.

It’s pretty much limited to the US now though. Most people elsewhere are unlikely to have heard of it.

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/

This story is AI slop

AI slop that has been told for decades. Lol

No one with an IQ above room temperature believes that story.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/

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.

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.

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.

Using a manual espresso machine is one of the hardest culinary preparations. It takes much more skill than one would assume!

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