The first hamburger I ever made on my own was a disaster of pure logical thinking.
Ground meat + heat = cooked meat ~= hamburger, right? Well, not exactly.
I had reasoned my way right into something gray, rubbery, and steaming with a kind of sad, meaty resignation. The microwave had technically done its job. I had technically made myself some food. And it was completely inedible.
The thing I didn't understand yet was the Maillard reaction2. The chemical process where high, direct heat transforms the surface of the meat into something deeply browned, complex, and savory.
Throughout this process, food becomes chemically and structurally different. But the microwave, steaming the meat from the inside out, bypasses all of that entirely. You satisfy the letter of the law, so to speak, while missing the entire point of the exercise.
I've seen a lot of this in the software industry. Need to add search in the next 24 hours? Throw a LIKE '%query%' on a
text column. Need a job queue? A cron job3 polling a table can technically work. Need to cache something? A dictionary
in memory, sure... up to a point. These features might ship, but they taste as bad as they sound.
What's interesting is that "doing things right" doesn't mean doing things the same way every time. An In-N-Out Double-Double Animal Style (without cheese)5 and an A5 Wagyu smash burger finished with hand-shaved truffles flown in from Périgord are both good burgers. They're not really competing with each other. However, both of their creators clearly thought hard about what they're trying to accomplish, and I'm sure they had numerous failed attempts along the way.
The In-N-Out burger is a marvel of consistency, speed, and simplicity under enormous volume. The Wagyu burger is a singular exercise in coaxing maximum expression out of extraordinary ingredients for someone who managed to score a reservation at that restaurant months ago.
That first experiment with my microwave burger clearly fits under none of the above.
To be fair to the microwave, it's excellent at what it's designed for. Reheating soup, steaming vegetables, softening butter for a recipe, heating water for a nice hot cup of tea.7 It's fast, consistent, and there's no cleanup (usually). The tool isn't the problem. The problem is applying it where its fundamental mechanism (vibrating the water molecules11, no surface heat) is exactly wrong for what you need. A microwave isn't a grill, and a grill isn't a microwave. M ≠ G.
That's the real lesson I eventually learned from my gray, steaming disaster. The goal isn't to find the fastest technique and just apply it everywhere. It's to develop enough understanding of why things work that you can choose the right approach for the problem at hand.
A tool is an answer. An entire garage full of tools13 is a most excellent set of stuff to have on hand17. But before you can make effective use of any tool, you have to understand what it is that you're actually trying to make.
In-N-Out's problem is a classic systems design problem: standardized inputs, consistent output at enormous volume. The Wagyu burger's is a translation problem: the ingredients are extraordinary, and the chef's job is mostly just not to ruin them. Same category of object, completely different destination, and a very different process... or is it?
The end products are both hamburgers. But... what if you could source A5 Wagyu and some truffly bits for your local In-N-Out at basically the same cost as the current ingredients? What if you could bring your ingredients into the place and have them make you a Double-Double Animal Style, but with your A5 Wagyu and truffles?
Software engineering has been evolving in that direction, and it's snowballing at a rapid rate (almost by the day, now). If I want to upgrade one part of the system without touching the other components, no problem. This has been true for a while in large organizations, but all of this is now accessible at a moment's notice to a one-man band.
There are some things that you just end up making, simply because you can't just not make the things.
Last month I made a Jamaican-Chettinad oxtail curry. Two spice traditions with no historical reason to share a pot, three days of prep, five people who ever tasted it. IMHO it came out really well — at any rate, many orders of magnitude better, when compared to that first microwave burger.
The experience of making this taught me things that no recipe contains. What happens when all-prime-number-spice meets tamarind? What does oxtail want from a braise, and what it will not forgive? That's the feedback loop. Sometimes, there are the creations that you just happen to be a vessel for. They need to exist. At the same time, you want to make it because you want to find out what will happen. Deliberate work and irrational one-offs teach each other in strange and mysterious ways.
With that said, there are some irrational one-offs I'd rather keep as one-offs, such as the "boiled sheep parts soup" I had while volunteering on the Navajo Reservation, but that's a completely different story.
By the way, this little story has taken me almost four hours to write (and that's with AI assistance). That's more than twice as long as it took to do the actual code, styling, and infrastructure for the initial part of the project, which is probably the reason you ended up here in the first place.
But I'm sure there's probably some kind of reason for this craft loop to have come into existence.
man cron(1).