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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
by PaulRobinson 2mo ago
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.
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoGo 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.
- PaulRobinson 2mo agoThat "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
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoCorn 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.
- gbin 2mo agoI read corn oil while I expect 3 star Michelin steak. What are we talking about oO
- garbageman 2mo agoSous 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.
- puchatek 2mo agoYou need something to vacuum seal the food. Is that included in the $30?
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoyou really don't for most things. Ziplock is fine for things that take an hour or two.
- mayoff 2mo agoThat 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZPLF0ezw8nn
- wildzzz 2mo agoI 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.
- pton_xd 2mo agoReminds 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.
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoThen don't go to a good restaurant. Sous vide is extremely common, and oils of various types are used liberally.
- pton_xd 2mo agoYeah, that's (one of the reasons) why eating out frequently is unhealthy.
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoThe discussion is about a good steak....
- gamblor956 2mo agoSteakhouses, and most restaurants, do not sous vide the meat. It takes too long.
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoMany do. They don't start when you order....
- crazygringo 2mo agoExactly this. It's all done ahead of time. The grill cook only has to throw it on the grill, sear it, warming it up enough to eat, but making sure the interior doesn't go above whatever the original sous vide temperature was.
- gamblor956 2mo ago
- fishtoaster 2mo agoSince 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.
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoSure - but you shouldn't be running a ribeye, as an example, at 130. Run it at 138 for 4 hours.
- searealist 2mo agoThe internet loves using 137 for Ribeyes for the reason you said. I've had good luck going with 135 for ~4 hours.
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoSame! Unless I'm doing a filet, I just prefer grilling. Or reverse sear if you don't mind running the oven.
- oconnor663 2mo agoIf the problem is that the temperature is too low for the cut, you can just use a higher temp?
- gamblor956 2mo agoa filet better than most restaurants. Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any half decent steakhouse.
- searealist 2mo agoSous vide is fool proof, you cant mess it up. All you have to worry about is the sear, and that's easy too.
- sethammons 2mo agoI went to the second rated steakhouse in NY at the time and got a steak some ten years back. I would have preferred my home-sous-vide by a wide margin. I have only had a better steak twice, and only once from a restaurant
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoYou leave it unseasoned until the end?
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoFor 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.
- crazygringo 2mo agoIt's pretty critical to salt fully (not just a tiny bit) at the start rather than at the end. Meat where the salt is just on the surface, vs. meat where the salt has fully penetrated, is like night and day.
- 1659447091 2mo ago> Go to costco, buy prime filet. Put it in a ziplock [...] 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
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoToday I learned that lots of people think they know how to make a great steak, but give terrible steak-cooking advice.
- MostlyStable 2mo agoMy 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.
- calf 2mo agoA steak is hard because the processes to make it are physically contradictory (crust vs interior). Its hardness is a microcosm for why cooking in general is hard. There is a profound value in that, in that if you can handle a single steak (to some standard of satisfaction) then you will have the general skills to handle recipes involving even more steps. It becomes a reduction argument. It is true that the more moving parts/steps/interactions a dish involves the hardness grows combinatorially. But that is logistical hardness, e.g. managing the complexity of a flavor profile. Soon that amount of multiplication/permutations escapes the realm of any one human being to handle.
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoThis 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.
- s_dev 2mo ago>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.