6 ms·

On the trivial point of view, I've never get why don't people just buy cheap potatoes, peals them, slice them, and finally fry them. If you're not clever enough

On the trivial point of view, I've never get why don't people just buy cheap potatoes, peals them, slice them, and finally fry them. If you're not clever enough to do that be not surprised to be abused by a cartel.

seszett 2y ago
It takes time and it smells.
- sethammons 2y ago
  Smells due to the fry oil. If you have a range vent, frying under it helps significantly. Related: why is it so hard finding a house with a range hood (and not the useless recirculator with carbon filter)?
  - seszett 2y ago
    Actual range hoods mess with ventilation, so it's easier for builders to stick a recirculating one and not have to worry about ventilation imbalance. There's also the belief that it will somehow break the main ventilation motor because of the large volume of air forced through it. But it shouldn't actually be a problem.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    Well it does require a vented pipe through your roof, and the people subcontracted for installing kitchen cabinetry and appliances are often coming in long after all the plumbing, HVAC, and roofing guys are gone who are going to have the ladders, be in the ceiling, and have the tar or vent pipe on hand needed to install a roof vent, and it is more of a pain if the stove isn't centered between joists and rafter beams. Now none of that is a great excuse, it isn't that hard to do, but with how most buildings are subcontracted out piece by piece for every little part, and how some things like the kitchen appliance location is not super well finalized until cabinetry is actually installed, nobody before the cabinetry wants to take the responsibility of is positioning and the cabinetry guys are not expected or expecting to install such features. It is time, expense, and the liability of punching a hole in the roof before someone decides they want the stove on the other side of the room, or coming in months afterwards and punching a hole in a brand new roof as someone not the roofer. If everything is well established in the blueprints and nobody is going to be changing their mind, or if one guy/company is doing 90% of the work themselves its not a problem. But often things are changed kitchen wise after most of the house is built or is done by 10+ different contractors, none of which want to be held responsible later on for it. Often one company does the structure, another the roof, another the siding, another the drywall, another the plumbing, another the electrical, another hvac, another cabinetry, etc, and only the plumbing and furnace vents are going to be putting holes in the roof which happens long before any finished features like the cabinetry is put in.
    - jaapz 2y ago
      Weird, here in the netherlands you'll be hard pressed to find a kitchen that does not have a hood that exhausts to outside. However currently there is a movement to (more expensive, luxury) solutions that do not have a vent hood and instead vent through a recirculation filter (Bora).
      - MisterTea 2y ago
        Could be a code thing.
    - franktankbank 2y ago
      You can go out sidewall in fact I'm pretty sure that is very common.
    - MisterTea 2y ago
      I think it just has to do with a complete lack of building code requiring them so they are a total afterthought. I also feel many people dont really cook at home anymore so even less reason to have one installed. However, two friends who love to cook or have an SO who does have had full outside vented range hoods installed when they remodeled. One is so serious they have a commercial hood over a 6 burner stove. That guy brings his own lunch almost daily complete with their own fresh baked bread. His SO has a library of cookbooks and enough kitchen equipment to feed an army.
- cess11 2y ago
  You don't have ventilation above your stove? Where I live cheap frozen pommes frites costs about the same per kilo as washed good quality fresh potatoes, and personally I think slicing and putting them in the oven with butter, salt, black pepper and herbs is much tastier than fries. To me it's worth the effort.
  - javawizard 2y ago
    > You don't have ventilation above your stove? My stove fan vents straight back into the room. Anecdotally maybe 75% of friends whose stoves I've observed do the same thing. It's a travesty as far as I'm concerned, but there you are. (I live in an apartment; otherwise you can bet I would have done something about it before now.)
    - cess11 2y ago
      That's insane. There aren't regulations around this where you live?
      - vultour 2y ago
        I really doubt there are regulations around this where you live. Recirculating vents are only going to grow more popular as they're now often built into your electric/induction hob.
        cess11 2y ago
        OK, here's a portion of it: https://www.boverket.se/sv/PBL-kunskapsbanken/regler-om-byggande/boverkets-byggregler/ventilation/koksventilation/ https://www.boverket.se/sv/PBL-kunskapsbanken/regler-om-bygg... Not leading away moisture from the kitchen when cooking doesn't sound like a good idea to me but I'm just a child of a craftsperson working with these kinds of things, not one myself. Except if you live in like a hut with a lot of openings or something, but I'm kind of assuming this is about apartments and houses with isolation and so on.
    - seszett 2y ago
rob74 2y ago
Probably the reason is that making your french fries "from scratch" (at least in a high-wage country like the US) would be much more expensive than buying frozen french fries, even at "cartel prices"?
Thorrez 2y ago
According to this, frozen tastes better. And house made fries take a lot of kitchen space. https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs-favorite-frozen-french-fries-6827034 https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs-favorite-frozen-french-fri...
- Dead_Lemon 2y ago
  I'm not sure how a knife and a cutting board take up a load of space in a home kitchen I'd argue that the quality of a fry/chip does depend on the type of potatoes used. My experience is frozen fries are mediocre at best. Even on a commercial scale, its a peeling machine and a cutting/chipping machine, no worse than a mixing machine for making dough or similar industrial kitchen machines.
  - meheleventyone 2y ago
    I think the issue on a commercial scale is the sheer volume of fries you need to make and store continuously versus the benefit to the end result over frozen.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    > My experience is frozen fries are mediocre at best. Probably depends how they’re cooked, see Chris Young’s video as an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk&t=15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk&t=15s
Ekaros 2y ago
Doing it properly is quite a bit of work. You want at least two frys, preferably 3 or 2 and par-boiling. With cutting and other work it is lot of effort. And then if you don't want to deal with large amount of fat and instead use oven or air fryer for something passable.
- meheleventyone 2y ago
  Whilst you can do all sorts of variations making basic chips for a casual meal is really straightforward. Just chop up some potatoes, coat them in oil and wack them in the oven at 200C for 30-40 minutes. Works just as well with sweet potatoes as well. Everything else is to an extent gilding the lily which you might want to do at home if you're entertaining or like things a certain way but isn't strictly necessary.
  - gotorazor 2y ago
    vs buying frozen french fries --- which takes 10 mins on a countertop airfryer. It's not that people don't know how to fry from fresh potato, it's just that the time it takes to do so is a lot. For restaurants especially, frozen is also just more cost-effective after accounting for labour.
    - meheleventyone 2y ago
      I totally buy that for a commercial kitchen particularly going to the lengths in the sibling article but at home you're usually cooking a bunch of stuff and in general will be taking longer. Also the vast majority of that time is fire and forget since it's just doing its thing in the oven. Yesterday for example I made fish and chips for my family of four and made chips peeled, cut, par-boiled and twice fried in as long as it took to prep and cook the fish, make a salad and heat up some baked beans. Which is a heck of a lot more active than the easiest way to do it but hardly this huge time sink. I suspect choice at home is more expectations and lifestyle related.
      - freejazz 2y ago
thrance 2y ago
What's the point of even living in a society if you have to do everything yourself? This is no fix to cartels and corruption.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
In Belgium you still have those "french fries vans" ("baraque a frites", which are not necessarily vans btw -- they can be little prefab structures) and there's a difference between the traditional ones, where potatoes are still pealed and sliced, by hand (giving fries all of uneven sizes) and the industrial ones, using factory-made fries. Of course the real traditional ones are better. And some shall proudly display a sign saying: "Ici on coupe les pommes de terre a la main" ("Here we slice the potatoes by hand"). Due to cholesterol and LCL level through the roof (as in: doctor hadn't seen that in decades saying it became extremely rare nowadays to be that bad), sadly since a year I can't anymore. I used to love these greasy full carbs but then the stroke ain't far for me so... I'm now following a very strict diet and thankfully my levels are slowly coming down :-/ P.S: FWIW my mother-in-law still does it at home the traditional way.
- rob74 2y ago
  For context: Belgian fries are traditionally fried in animal fat, which makes them even worse for your cholesterol level than fries fried in oil (but also gives them a unique taste). In Germany it isn't even allowed to offer this version in a restaurant...
  - hooli_gan 2y ago
    The main problem I see with frying in animal fat is, the already small selection of vegetarian food at most restaurants could be 0, after you also remove fries as an option.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    Are you saying that in Germany you are legally prohibited from selling potatoes fried in animal fat?
    - rob74 2y ago
      Well... actually not, turns out that what I wrote above was just hearsay, I couldn't find any hard evidence to back it up. It doesn't have to be legally prohibited however - Germans also have other regulations, e.g. you can't call your Döner Kebab a Döner Kebab if it contains more then 60% mincemeat (the rest has to be sliced meat).
bell-cot 2y ago
This, but why french fry them? A modestly-skilled cook can prepare potatoes in plenty of different ways. Many of which are easier (at small scale) than french frying.
- jaapz 2y ago
  Why fry them at all? Just boil them with the skins on. But in al seriousness, you fry them because you want to eat fries, not mashed potatoes, today...
- f1shy 2y ago
  One could also ask: Why eating potatoes at all... you can have a heathy diet without potatoes. I think the answer is: because people like fried potatoes?
mattbee 2y ago
This is the "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" comment, but about potatoes.
- froh 2y ago
  I needed to triple check if I was in a time loop, but I guess that's just the he icing on the joke. in that sense: "why not just rcs? much simpler."
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Dropbox really is bad and didn’t deserve to be successful. Its success is more a product of ZIRP than a comment about its utility. Why do we act like this “lore” of HN is something we all have to refer to to prove how “wrong” we were?
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Saying that Dropbox is bad is the second coming of the original meme saying it’s trivial. Yall will never learn.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      Self flagelation because we can't imagine any other future. "The way things are is the only way things could have ever been" - you, implicitly. So tired of folks who uncritically think "this is the best way that things could have been". Voltaire literally wrote a whole book called "Candide" which tries to call out this exact thought-cliche.
      - SR2Z 2y ago
        You can't have it both ways. Either Dropbox is trivial and should have been replaced, or it's not and deserves its success.
  - throw5959 2y ago
pjc50 2y ago
I'm not sure why on HN of all places people would think that it's more efficient for millions of people to do work by hand rather than just having it done by machine at scale.
ChoHag 2y ago
[dead]
jdietrich 2y ago
I value my time more highly than that. I am quite happy to pay someone else to save me that labour. Secondly, frozen fries aren't just sliced potatoes. They're a potato that is very precisely bred and grown specifically to make fries that is then blanched, coated in a specific mix of starches and part fried. Unless you're Heston Blumenthal, you aren't going to re-create that product in your own kitchen.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Exactly. Especially when frozen fries are so cheap anyway. I make potato chips far more frequently than handmade fries because chips are much faster, end to end. Even with a french fry cutter to speed up the process. Yeah, it tastes better, especially with garden-fresh potatoes, but usually the juice just ain't worth the squeeze!
- Aloisius 2y ago
  I've made good french fries. It's not that hard. It certainly doesn't require one being Blumenthal. It does, however, take too much advanced planning and frankly it's not worth the hassle of cleaning up. That said, I don't think it's really worth the hassle to fry frozen fries either - and even convection baked they're meh.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
I’m not going to spend an hour cooking to save $3.
detritus 2y ago
I cook all the time, mostly from scratch, but I keep frozen french fries in the freezer for very quick 'junk' meals, and more particularly because I don't in any way want to have deep-ish oil boiling my kitchen, for safety and odour reasons. On a trivial point of view, I never understand why some people don't get that other people's existences diverge from their own experience... .
mrguyorama 2y ago
>If you're not clever enough Ah yes, the people without the time to homemake fries are simply dumb, that's all. No worries about all the people suffering, they're just dumb.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Because I hate cooking.

seszett 2y ago

It takes time and it smells.

sethammons 2y ago
Smells due to the fry oil. If you have a range vent, frying under it helps significantly. Related: why is it so hard finding a house with a range hood (and not the useless recirculator with carbon filter)?
- seszett 2y ago
  Actual range hoods mess with ventilation, so it's easier for builders to stick a recirculating one and not have to worry about ventilation imbalance. There's also the belief that it will somehow break the main ventilation motor because of the large volume of air forced through it. But it shouldn't actually be a problem.
- AngryData 2y ago
  Well it does require a vented pipe through your roof, and the people subcontracted for installing kitchen cabinetry and appliances are often coming in long after all the plumbing, HVAC, and roofing guys are gone who are going to have the ladders, be in the ceiling, and have the tar or vent pipe on hand needed to install a roof vent, and it is more of a pain if the stove isn't centered between joists and rafter beams. Now none of that is a great excuse, it isn't that hard to do, but with how most buildings are subcontracted out piece by piece for every little part, and how some things like the kitchen appliance location is not super well finalized until cabinetry is actually installed, nobody before the cabinetry wants to take the responsibility of is positioning and the cabinetry guys are not expected or expecting to install such features. It is time, expense, and the liability of punching a hole in the roof before someone decides they want the stove on the other side of the room, or coming in months afterwards and punching a hole in a brand new roof as someone not the roofer. If everything is well established in the blueprints and nobody is going to be changing their mind, or if one guy/company is doing 90% of the work themselves its not a problem. But often things are changed kitchen wise after most of the house is built or is done by 10+ different contractors, none of which want to be held responsible later on for it. Often one company does the structure, another the roof, another the siding, another the drywall, another the plumbing, another the electrical, another hvac, another cabinetry, etc, and only the plumbing and furnace vents are going to be putting holes in the roof which happens long before any finished features like the cabinetry is put in.
  - jaapz 2y ago
    Weird, here in the netherlands you'll be hard pressed to find a kitchen that does not have a hood that exhausts to outside. However currently there is a movement to (more expensive, luxury) solutions that do not have a vent hood and instead vent through a recirculation filter (Bora).
    - MisterTea 2y ago
      Could be a code thing.
  - franktankbank 2y ago
    You can go out sidewall in fact I'm pretty sure that is very common.
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    I think it just has to do with a complete lack of building code requiring them so they are a total afterthought. I also feel many people dont really cook at home anymore so even less reason to have one installed. However, two friends who love to cook or have an SO who does have had full outside vented range hoods installed when they remodeled. One is so serious they have a commercial hood over a 6 burner stove. That guy brings his own lunch almost daily complete with their own fresh baked bread. His SO has a library of cookbooks and enough kitchen equipment to feed an army.
cess11 2y ago
You don't have ventilation above your stove? Where I live cheap frozen pommes frites costs about the same per kilo as washed good quality fresh potatoes, and personally I think slicing and putting them in the oven with butter, salt, black pepper and herbs is much tastier than fries. To me it's worth the effort.
- javawizard 2y ago
  > You don't have ventilation above your stove? My stove fan vents straight back into the room. Anecdotally maybe 75% of friends whose stoves I've observed do the same thing. It's a travesty as far as I'm concerned, but there you are. (I live in an apartment; otherwise you can bet I would have done something about it before now.)
  - cess11 2y ago
    That's insane. There aren't regulations around this where you live?
    - vultour 2y ago
      I really doubt there are regulations around this where you live. Recirculating vents are only going to grow more popular as they're now often built into your electric/induction hob.
      - cess11 2y ago
        OK, here's a portion of it: https://www.boverket.se/sv/PBL-kunskapsbanken/regler-om-byggande/boverkets-byggregler/ventilation/koksventilation/ https://www.boverket.se/sv/PBL-kunskapsbanken/regler-om-bygg... Not leading away moisture from the kitchen when cooking doesn't sound like a good idea to me but I'm just a child of a craftsperson working with these kinds of things, not one myself. Except if you live in like a hut with a lot of openings or something, but I'm kind of assuming this is about apartments and houses with isolation and so on.
  - seszett 2y ago

rob74 2y ago

Probably the reason is that making your french fries "from scratch" (at least in a high-wage country like the US) would be much more expensive than buying frozen french fries, even at "cartel prices"?

Thorrez 2y ago

According to this, frozen tastes better. And house made fries take a lot of kitchen space. https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs-favorite-frozen-french-fries-6827034 https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs-favorite-frozen-french-fri...

Dead_Lemon 2y ago
I'm not sure how a knife and a cutting board take up a load of space in a home kitchen I'd argue that the quality of a fry/chip does depend on the type of potatoes used. My experience is frozen fries are mediocre at best. Even on a commercial scale, its a peeling machine and a cutting/chipping machine, no worse than a mixing machine for making dough or similar industrial kitchen machines.
- meheleventyone 2y ago
  I think the issue on a commercial scale is the sheer volume of fries you need to make and store continuously versus the benefit to the end result over frozen.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  > My experience is frozen fries are mediocre at best. Probably depends how they’re cooked, see Chris Young’s video as an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk&t=15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk&t=15s

Ekaros 2y ago

Doing it properly is quite a bit of work. You want at least two frys, preferably 3 or 2 and par-boiling. With cutting and other work it is lot of effort. And then if you don't want to deal with large amount of fat and instead use oven or air fryer for something passable.

meheleventyone 2y ago
Whilst you can do all sorts of variations making basic chips for a casual meal is really straightforward. Just chop up some potatoes, coat them in oil and wack them in the oven at 200C for 30-40 minutes. Works just as well with sweet potatoes as well. Everything else is to an extent gilding the lily which you might want to do at home if you're entertaining or like things a certain way but isn't strictly necessary.
- gotorazor 2y ago
  vs buying frozen french fries --- which takes 10 mins on a countertop airfryer. It's not that people don't know how to fry from fresh potato, it's just that the time it takes to do so is a lot. For restaurants especially, frozen is also just more cost-effective after accounting for labour.
  - meheleventyone 2y ago
    I totally buy that for a commercial kitchen particularly going to the lengths in the sibling article but at home you're usually cooking a bunch of stuff and in general will be taking longer. Also the vast majority of that time is fire and forget since it's just doing its thing in the oven. Yesterday for example I made fish and chips for my family of four and made chips peeled, cut, par-boiled and twice fried in as long as it took to prep and cook the fish, make a salad and heat up some baked beans. Which is a heck of a lot more active than the easiest way to do it but hardly this huge time sink. I suspect choice at home is more expectations and lifestyle related.
    - freejazz 2y ago

thrance 2y ago

What's the point of even living in a society if you have to do everything yourself? This is no fix to cartels and corruption.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

In Belgium you still have those "french fries vans" ("baraque a frites", which are not necessarily vans btw -- they can be little prefab structures) and there's a difference between the traditional ones, where potatoes are still pealed and sliced, by hand (giving fries all of uneven sizes) and the industrial ones, using factory-made fries. Of course the real traditional ones are better. And some shall proudly display a sign saying: "Ici on coupe les pommes de terre a la main" ("Here we slice the potatoes by hand"). Due to cholesterol and LCL level through the roof (as in: doctor hadn't seen that in decades saying it became extremely rare nowadays to be that bad), sadly since a year I can't anymore. I used to love these greasy full carbs but then the stroke ain't far for me so... I'm now following a very strict diet and thankfully my levels are slowly coming down :-/ P.S: FWIW my mother-in-law still does it at home the traditional way.

rob74 2y ago
For context: Belgian fries are traditionally fried in animal fat, which makes them even worse for your cholesterol level than fries fried in oil (but also gives them a unique taste). In Germany it isn't even allowed to offer this version in a restaurant...
- hooli_gan 2y ago
  The main problem I see with frying in animal fat is, the already small selection of vegetarian food at most restaurants could be 0, after you also remove fries as an option.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Are you saying that in Germany you are legally prohibited from selling potatoes fried in animal fat?
  - rob74 2y ago
    Well... actually not, turns out that what I wrote above was just hearsay, I couldn't find any hard evidence to back it up. It doesn't have to be legally prohibited however - Germans also have other regulations, e.g. you can't call your Döner Kebab a Döner Kebab if it contains more then 60% mincemeat (the rest has to be sliced meat).

bell-cot 2y ago

This, but why french fry them? A modestly-skilled cook can prepare potatoes in plenty of different ways. Many of which are easier (at small scale) than french frying.

jaapz 2y ago
Why fry them at all? Just boil them with the skins on. But in al seriousness, you fry them because you want to eat fries, not mashed potatoes, today...
f1shy 2y ago
One could also ask: Why eating potatoes at all... you can have a heathy diet without potatoes. I think the answer is: because people like fried potatoes?

mattbee 2y ago

This is the "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" comment, but about potatoes.

froh 2y ago
I needed to triple check if I was in a time loop, but I guess that's just the he icing on the joke. in that sense: "why not just rcs? much simpler."
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Dropbox really is bad and didn’t deserve to be successful. Its success is more a product of ZIRP than a comment about its utility. Why do we act like this “lore” of HN is something we all have to refer to to prove how “wrong” we were?
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Saying that Dropbox is bad is the second coming of the original meme saying it’s trivial. Yall will never learn.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Self flagelation because we can't imagine any other future. "The way things are is the only way things could have ever been" - you, implicitly. So tired of folks who uncritically think "this is the best way that things could have been". Voltaire literally wrote a whole book called "Candide" which tries to call out this exact thought-cliche.
    - SR2Z 2y ago
      You can't have it both ways. Either Dropbox is trivial and should have been replaced, or it's not and deserves its success.
- throw5959 2y ago

pjc50 2y ago

I'm not sure why on HN of all places people would think that it's more efficient for millions of people to do work by hand rather than just having it done by machine at scale.

ChoHag 2y ago

[dead]

jdietrich 2y ago

I value my time more highly than that. I am quite happy to pay someone else to save me that labour. Secondly, frozen fries aren't just sliced potatoes. They're a potato that is very precisely bred and grown specifically to make fries that is then blanched, coated in a specific mix of starches and part fried. Unless you're Heston Blumenthal, you aren't going to re-create that product in your own kitchen.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
Exactly. Especially when frozen fries are so cheap anyway. I make potato chips far more frequently than handmade fries because chips are much faster, end to end. Even with a french fry cutter to speed up the process. Yeah, it tastes better, especially with garden-fresh potatoes, but usually the juice just ain't worth the squeeze!
Aloisius 2y ago
I've made good french fries. It's not that hard. It certainly doesn't require one being Blumenthal. It does, however, take too much advanced planning and frankly it's not worth the hassle of cleaning up. That said, I don't think it's really worth the hassle to fry frozen fries either - and even convection baked they're meh.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago

I’m not going to spend an hour cooking to save $3.

detritus 2y ago

I cook all the time, mostly from scratch, but I keep frozen french fries in the freezer for very quick 'junk' meals, and more particularly because I don't in any way want to have deep-ish oil boiling my kitchen, for safety and odour reasons. On a trivial point of view, I never understand why some people don't get that other people's existences diverge from their own experience... .

mrguyorama 2y ago

>If you're not clever enough Ah yes, the people without the time to homemake fries are simply dumb, that's all. No worries about all the people suffering, they're just dumb.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Because I hate cooking.