Why AI will never tell you anything truly useful about butter.
News item: Google’s New AI Reports that The Safe Minimum Internal Temperature for Cooking Poultry is 102°F
“That’s wrong information!” As Katherine Hepburn shouted in the highly underrated film Desk Set, which predicted a lot of the messiness of AI way back in 1957 from a screenplay by Norah Ephron’s parents of all people. It’s more like 160°F, but to be fair, a lot of chefs trained in the western brigade de cuisine think most Americans not only eat beef overdone, but eat chicken (slightly) and pork (kind of a lot) overcooked.
So there is a spectrum of opinion. And 102°F is very authoritatively not in that spectrum.
Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot shared in social about AI suggestions to eat rocks and add glue to your pizza cheese. Big laughs. A lot of this poorly-scraped reddit flotsam, interestingly, centers around food.
But expertise is a real thing. And some things, a lot of things, I think, should come from authoritative sources. Clearly, the biggest brains in AI research disagree.
But here’s a thing the bots will never tell you: If you don’t know how to properly blanch, and cool, then saute a vegetable, you’ve never really tasted a cooked vegetable. And that’s just sad, because it’s really easy, and, like, twice as fast. Asparagus blanches especially well. Ironically, asparagus should never be put in an asparagus cooker, the tallest, most useless pot ever marketed to the leisure class of the north sides of most cities, and never seen on the line at any restaurant I’ve ever been to. You have a 12-inch pan, that’s what you goddamn use.
And while you’re at it, get the good butter to finish. It makes a huge difference …in everything, from the saute to searing to sauces to finishing your chassuer. Cook a diced onion or sear off some mushrooms in good butter. The smell that fills the room – it’s one on the great pleasures of life, truly. Kerrygold at the barest minimum, unsalted Beurre D’insgny even better. Hell, even Trader Joe’s sells Normandy-adjacent butter, and it’s pretty damn great. Ten bucks for butter, you say? When the utterly tasteless yellow lego brick that is American grocery store butter is only $7? Getting it, and using it, will be the best 3 extra bucks you will ever spend in a grocery.
And why is that? Why does the US suffer from this serious butter gap? The EU requires a far higher butterfat content, and they’re pretty serious about it. The USDA’s looser rules on butter production were built for the 1930s, so even the best artisanal butter Vermont or Wisconsin can put a blue ribbon on generally can’t beat even the lowly Trader Joe’s Brittany Butter (at about $5!).
The only caution I’d have about your switch to better butter is that if you do a lot of baking, you’ll notice your baking time may change because there’s so much less water and so much higher quality good stuff (complex fats and the terrior of the place its made) in non-US butter.
Don’t get me wrong. America makes a lot of great things. Even the French can’t beat the frites at McDonalds, they’ll angrily admit. But not butter. We Americans, for the most part, suck at butter.
If you made it this far, and congrats, you now know almost everything I personally know about butter. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t the answer to a specific query. It’s at least somewhat authoritative. There may have been knowledge you didn’t have. And didn’t need. But it comes from real experience, not mashed up from a spectrum of internet opinions with no skin in the game.
Because AI answers only pretend to be authoritative. It’s built, not to teach, but to sound like a teacher.
It’s never cooked a steak, or ruined cacio e pepe 15 times before finally learning to do it right. It can’t really tell you when the chop is done because it can’t see the cut or feel which rib it came from. It scrapes mass opinions, not the expertise of, say, a single Chef Ludo Lefebvre. It’s an illusion, taking credit for things it’s never done and can never experience.
Now don’t get me started on eggs.
