Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style Monday has shuffled into view once more and brought with it another Register reader confession in the form of our regular Who, Me? column. "Charles," for that is most definitely not his name, is the culprit this week in a cautionary tale of why displaying some sort of confirmation text is probably a good idea. Our story takes …
No, that's not how *nix works, it has to let users wondering about what happened "magically", you have to trust the system, admins and developers. Confirmations are for lusers. Then you get 56 pizzas - at least they should not have had pepperoni, I hope....
The dangerous commands comment should, obviously, carry a caveat of if you are running commands that you do not know what they do as a privileged user, you should have your privilege revoked immediatly.
I don't know how Unix got dragged in here, but ever since Unix edition 2 or 3 in the 1970s, you've had the concept of ordinary users and privileged users, so there has been no excuse to do day-to-day user tasks with a privileged account.
I was just wondering who the hell runs a '400 allowing users access to the command line, let alone the ability to actually run something on it?
The most completely bulletproof security model of any O/S ever produced[1] and somebody, somewhere never bothered to implement it.
[1] If done correctly, users have access to menus, menus have access to applications, applications have access to data. Even if a user can get a command line it won't do anything for them.
As compensation for being a proper sysadmin for many years and avoiding tweaking my shell environment too much to cause problems in broken environments, I've since gone overboard in tweaking things. My shell prompt now shows a green ✓ or a red ✗ depending on $?
Well, OS/400 was POSIX-branded, eventually. I think with V4R3 in 1998. And it eventually included most of the non-POSIX parts of the Single UNIX Specification, too. And it has PASE, which is basically AIX-under-i.
But, yeah, OS/400 is about the least-UNIXy UNIX-compatible OS ever.
Personally, even though I'm a longtime UNIX1 developer, I have a certain fondness for OS/400. It's so bizarre and awkward for anyone not coming from an S/38 background, particularly in its early days and on underpowered machines like the B-series. Using it was ergodic, like playing a programming RPG. And there's something very satisfying about filling in a bunch of options on one of the big scrolling menus in PDM, whacking the rock-solid Enter key on your hulking 5250, and going off for lunch because you know it'll be an hour before it's finished compiling.
Developing in UNIX is like flying. Developing in OS/400 was like hiking up a mountain. Either way you achieve some altitude, but it's a very different experience.
1And Windows, and OS/2, and a bit of IBM z, and some VAX, and ...
"Developing in UNIX is like flying. Developing in OS/400 was like hiking up a mountain. Either way you achieve some altitude, but it's a very different experience."
When I'm flying I prefer to go well over the top of the mountain, or to go around it completely ... Come to think of it, maybe your analogy is more apt than intended :-)
In the time frame of TOA, un*x/POSIX wasn't an option on the AS/400 (outside of Armonk, perhaps ... and maybe Murray Hill ... the BSD world was working on it, of course).
OS/400 was best.OS.ever - it was adding all that Unix/POSIX shite that "corrupted its purity". If only IBM would open-source V4R4 or V5R3. All the pizza comments underneath suggest most of the commenters have limited experience of an actual AS/400, or were irredeemably corrupted by prior experience to a Unix OS. So far as the flying/hiking metaphor goes, IMHO its more like Unix is waving a primitive handgun in a crowded room (you're bound to hit something, but the consequences are unpredictable) versus OS/400 being a decent sniper rifle whose trigger sometimes but rarely jams, in which case you wait/hope for the PTF. It takes longer to code stuff in OS/400 based languages, but if you can get it to compile, it'll work for decades. Soltis for president. :-)
Not even close. un*x is more like a 400+ piece mechanic's tool kit, OS/400 is like the kit you cobbled together out of your Dad's cast-offs to fix your bike when you were a kid.
Worse, OS/400 apparently corrupts people's brains to the point where they no longer understand how important pizza is.
That's not how humans function. We are designed to seek confirmation feed back. You ask for something, the other person says OK. They don't just hand it to you. If the computer screen doesn't say it's doing something, that implies it is not doing anything.
I've often suspected that computer human interfaces (UI) are designed by people who aren't very good with people. Then tested on people who like computers, ( which is why they do testing of them) not people.
If you really want to test an idea for a UI design ask a retired double-glazing salesman, a politician or a con man ( pretty much the same thing tbh) - they understand, intuitively, how people function or they fail at the job.
Some of the worst User Interfaces I've come across have been designed by software engineers, who haven't bothered to think about what the user is trying to do, they've bothered about how to reflect how you talk to the underlying system.
We had one screen where '1' meant switched off and '0' meant switched on. Check boxes? The words enabled or disabled? Hahaha. Everybody got confused by this. To the point when someone needed to add some more entries to the screen, and he made the new entries expect '1' for enabled.
It was an utter disaster.
I hate those 'cookie opt-outs' where the text is ambiguous and changes as you toggle the slider, so you're never really sure if you have opted in or out
(yes, I automatically dump the cookies on my personal machine but on my work machine it's a manual job)
>That's not how humans function. We are designed to seek confirmation feed back.
Unix is designed to allow you to string simple commands together.
That's tricky if the output of '2+2' = "The answer is 4 and 4 is the answer, 3 is not the answer unless the answer continues to 4, 5 is right out. "
What's sad / odd about that if you read some of Joel Spolsky's blog, is how easy some basic user testing can be.
"Hallway testing" is like you describe, grab 5 people walking down the hallway, and *gently encourage them to come test your software. Usually you'll discover any glaring problems with how your average person expects the software to work (user model) vs. how it actually works (program model) within the first 2 or 3 people.
*gentle encouragement = candy, cattle prod, or chloroform, depending on how bad the software is to start with.
I once had the privilege of working with a fellow who had a talent for doing "the unusual". Got used to running new code past him, and trying to stifle my urge to ask "Why did you do _that_?", because if one person felt a particular action "made sense", then there may be more, and maybe I should consider not "What I expect them to do", but "What they might do"
Always. The spec designer has built in expectations ( assumptions) about what people want/need/expect/will do.
The people who write the interface will carry their own assumptions.
Possibly the testers have a shared understanding because ( see previous post) they were dragooned from a shared hallway or were recruited from the general public by a market research agency who generally get people many of whom are interested in that product. Especially if the "incentive" pay and the venue convenience aren't that great. it's amazing how often market researcher companies actually make getting on to do the research difficult - a big disincentive to the disinterested users.
I'd suggest the best testing would be done by the sort of user who thinks the screen is the computer and the big square box is just there to rest the computer on and connect things to.
the sort of user who thinks... the big square box is just there to rest the computer on and connect things to.
That may have been true years ago when 'normal' people started having to use computers at work, and what they thought of as the computer was actually a VT52 terminal or similar. These days I find that even otherwise tech un-savvy people have absorbed some terminology (invariably not-quite-correctly) and the box is now either the 'CPU' or the 'hard drive' which connects to the 'monitor' - which is never as good as the one on their colleague's table and what does it take to get an upgrade around here? Once you realise that 'my hard drive isn't working' probably actually means the cleaners have unplugged it again things get a lot easier.
Of course, it's all being subverted these days, with all-in-ones such as the iMac meaning that (in a way) the monitor really is the computer.
M.
The developer's moto -
"Well, it works fine on my computer!"
To be fair, it was only the developers I had to deal with directly said this, developers from other companies were more helpful.
Felt like putting up a sign on the inside of the door - "Warning! You are about to enter the real world".
One example that comes to mind, before you downvote me is that we sold a system that you could import user photos for IDs. Considering every digital camera I've seen saves in JPG format, why would you set the file type to BMP?
With caution. Vulnerable hourly paid staff may know which way the wind's blowing and want to be agreeable to whatever half-crazed inhuman piece of confusion the development team puts in front of them.
"Yes I really like the way the instruction says <move the slider switch to toggle on or off> with all the switches on the first page going to the left to be off and on the second page they go left to be on."
(And tbh I'm not sure I've exaggerated this).
Depends on the human. Many people I know that use Unix don't give you feedback if asked to do something, unless they have problems. That has likely influenced the design of Unix itself, which, if a command doesn't have a visible effect, doesn't often given any feedback unless it's reporting an error.
The fact that there are some exceptions does not, in the slightest, negate the point. People for the most part expect a response. Designing for the general user means you need to work to that standard.
And if, as a designer, you are not within that standard group you need to either find out how that group responds or gtfo of that line of work.
Variously
to have to have something,
a requirement, necessary duty, or obligation:
It is a requirement that a UI fits the expected behaviours held by the vast majority of users.
A developer has an obligation to meet the expected behaviours of those users ( unless there is a very good reason why not).
Obligation is rather subjective.
It's not all about you. (Nor even about me for that matter).
There's an aggressiveness about your assertions that is quite surprising - as if you are defending something.
However.
This is about what suits the vast generality of users.
What you do with your software ( if you create programmes at any level) is your business - up to the point where you want the ordinary member of the public to use it.
And then you need to match to ordinary human behaviour (needs) unless you are specifically designing for users who are different.
So, what you call "so called " needs are so called because the users do actually need that stuff.
And I use the terms "software" and "UI" quite generally - since I spent a great deal of time a few years ago working on a redraft with a professional who'd designed and drafted a really important data sharing application that was almost unusable - because she'd filled it full of jargon terms that either meant nothing to most users, or worse, meant something different. And then made completing it convoluted and confusing.
The mantra with many operating systems is "If it completes silently, it worked"
In the long-ago world of 24-line terminals, the last thing you want is to scroll valuable history off the top of the screen to accommodate the output from some chatty utility.
$ cd ~
We are now in your home directory.
Have a nice day!
$
Remember the hatred for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation doors with Real People Personalities.
No, the ~ represents a shortcut to your home directory. Try echo ~ then su to some other user and echo ~ again. So basically, cd ~ switches you to the home directory of the current login, regardless of where in the directory structure you issue the command.
A sometimes useful option for admins is cd ~username, which changes to username's home directory from anywhere in the directory structure.
On many older UNIX systems (and even on some Linux ones) the 'PS1' environment variable for the prompt is not set up by default to show you anything except a $ or # depending on whether you're a regular user or root.
I'm not sure how C Shell handles this but certainly with Bourne/Korn or Bash and derivatives it's PS1.
So as the other reply mentions cd ~ itself only takes you home - whether or not your prompt changes very specific to each environment include UNIX flavour, system defaults and user preferences.
OS/400sNotUnix
Although it does have a unix command line that isn't really unix. When IBM renamed their systems about 20 years ago, OS/390 became z/OS as the mainframes were rebranded as z series. Because the AS/400 became the i series, the operating system OS/400 should really have been renamed i/OS. Instead it's apparently called IBM i. Although nobody who uses it actually calls it that. If you aren't starting to get confused, then you might like this operating system. Otherwise, you can join everyone else who finds it's uppercase vowel free tribute to mainframe job control languages of decades past CMPLTLY FCKNG RRTTNG.
Actually, once I got past OS/400's major stupid design feature (9 character names and no extensions), it turned out to be a decent OS. What's not to like about the powerful command language and the full-screen prompting (a nicely formatted screen with boxes for entering command arguments, all boxes labelled with name, type of argument, and defaults that works for user-written stuff as well as standard utilities) and predictable command names once you've got your head round the abbreviation scheme that 9 character names requires, e.g. once you know that CRTRPGPGM (short for "create RPG program") runs the RPG compiler its easy to guess that CRTPLIPGM is the PL/1 compiler and CRTCBLPGM is the COBOL compiler. Don't know its parameters? Just type CRTCBLPGM and hit the 'screen prompt' key and there are all the arguments, named and summarised ready to fill in before hitting the 'Do it' key.
ICL's VME/B did the same thing, only better because it used nice meaningful names for commands, with a naming scheme that let you guess names with a good chance of being right, an additional short-form that was equally easy to understand and with an online command lookup system. For instance, to delete a file you used the 'deletefile' command or 'xf' for short. 'x' was always the abbreviation for 'delete', 'f' was always short for 'file' and 'n' for 'new', so you didn't have to be a genius to work out that "newfile(workspace)" would create a new file called workspace and that nf(workspace) would do the same thing. It also provided full-screen prompts for command parameters and these features worked for user-written code as well as for system commands.
Naming consistency is the only thing lacking in UNIX/Linux systems, but at least these have help prompts for most commands as well as manpages and the very useful 'apropos' command for looking up command names.
Bog help those condemned to use other OSen that lack these useful productivity aids.
Got dumped with OS/400 once when I was helping configure one (without knowing anything it) by someone who promptly went on holiday for the next 2 weeks leaving me as the "expert" after being given an introduction into it using the words "This is the login/password, I'm off on holiday now, bye".
Cupboard full of manuals and people asking me about x, y, z.
Once I got into the steep learning curve of logging in and then "now, what", actually came to like the command verb syntax. I reckon if you thought about what you wanted to do, you could work out the command 95% of the time without looking it up, and the command prompting was excellent.
Very weird operating system though.
I think it *was* called i/OS for a few years, from the time it was rebranded as eServer i Series in the 2000s to the consolidated Power Systems line (AIX and OS/400 on a common hardware platform, yay!) in 2008.
Thankfully, nobody got confused between the AS/400 operating system and those gimmicky smart phone OSes.
My first IT job was installing OS/400 on the machines that wrote the compilers for IBM... C, C++, COBOL, RPG. It was in the days of OS/400 V2R1.1.
I knew a little DOS, that was about it. CL was DevOPS before devops and you can do database magic with a few lines of RPG.
There was nothing like it in the time if you needed to develop a database application.
Linux and MySQL were years away. These machines powered every department store, car lot and town finance department.
Today I use Linux but OS/400 is an architecture that was purpose built, yes, but far before it's time.
Soltis was a genius . . . read the books.
A thin crust, Canadian bacon & pineapple is yummy. Anything with pepperoni on it isn't fit to feed the dog.
If you think otherwise then you are an Abomination Unto Nuggin & should be spanked with rancid sourkraut as punishment.
*Blows an exuberent, boisterous, feisty raspberry like a Frenchman atop the castle wall*
=-D
Putting pineapple on a pizza is like putting anchovies on ice cream - a perverse level of sickness that no one ever needs to experience. And remember, just because you can do something does not mean that you should. Ever.
Pepperoni on the other hand.....
"Putting pineapple on a pizza is like putting anchovies on ice cream"
In my house, pizza should have ham, pineapple and peach slices, ever since I discovered this in Argentina 16 years ago. Be careful when ordering in a language you don't speak very well:- when we ordered a similar pizza from another shop in a different city, we got one with something we were pretty sure was leeks, along with thousand island dressing and glace cherries as well as the ham and pineapple....
This reminds me of the first time I had Sweet and Sour Pork in the Netherlands (many years ago).
It seems their version of it translates as pieces of pork, battered, fried and served with a tinned fruit salad. Suffice it to say it never got ordered again, lesson learned.
If we're going down the "pineapple on pizza is an unholy abomination unto Italians", remember that there is no such thing as "pepperoni" in Italy. Closest thing by spelling is peperoni, which are sweet bell peppers and peperoncini, which are hot chilli peppers. For something close to the American pepperoni, you'd want salsiccia piccante, which literally means spicy sausage, and there are many fine varieties.
"peperoncini, which are hot chilli peppers"
For very, very small values of "hot".
Pepperoni is New York/New Jersey Italian immigrants making dry sausage with the ingredients they had available, but to Grandma's recipe. They probably didn't think much of the end result, either, but as a dry-cured sausage it was meat preserved for lean times. Which was the point. As is usually the case, the recipe was modified over time, and now there are some very edible varietals. None of these are mass-produced, though, and you are highly unlikely to find an edible version on a pizza in Europe. Or in Blighty, for that matter.
Thin crust is suitable only for repurposing the pizza as a frisbee.
I prefer to make my own using premade dough (don't have the time to do it properly) because I can stretch the dough square out then fold it over itself twice to have a proper inch thick base.
Then a light pasting of tomato and basil pasta sauce (not that horrid orange stuff that seems to blight too many a pizza). Keep it simple... A thin layer of mozzarella and a slightly thicker layer of cheddar and fuck all else. No burger bits, no pig bits, no shrooms, no fruit, no vomit, no cream, and definitely nothing that came out of the ocean or a horror movie (they're much of a muchness if you ask me).
Oven, fifteen minutes, job done when the cheese has melted and the dough is "somewhat dry on the outside".
I like thin, thick and deep pan but thin is the original genuine article first created in Italy and still the best IMO. The reason thick ones are popular in the UK (and I'm guessing the US) is that the thin ones here are mostly limp floppy things that fail to satisfy (oh er!). Proper thin ones are not floppy, they have bite and a bit of crunch.
I'm diabetic & am not allowed to have a regular nor thick crust pizza as the carbs end up shooting my blood sugar level into the stratosphere.
A thin crust pizza still spikes my BSL, but not nearly as bad as what I get if I have a pizza with a thicker crust.
Would I like a thicker crust? Sure. Can I have one without putting my arse in the hospital in a coma? Nope. =-(
"interesting2 depends on the origin/s of the contents, doner ranges in quality from CMOT Dibbler unnamed and unknown animal/anatomy to some of the excellent doner I get from a local Morroccan kebabista, though I can't recommend any doner when it's cold form the night before, for a morning after hangover breakfast.
You aren't supposed to use the wet mozzarella on pizza, it should be the grated dryer stuff. The wet stuff takes too long to melt compared to the cooking time of the rest of the ingredients...
The wet stuff is for eating raw. Preferably with a sprinking of fresh basil. But straight out of the packet is fine.
(could be a lie, I was told it by a Neapolitan though, so you never know.)
Here in the US, a pizza is sometimes called a pizza-pie regardless of style. Theories abound as to the name's origin, but they all seem to suggest it's NY/NJ Italian-American dialect. Myself, I suspect it's probably an alliteration thing from the early days of mass-market advertising.
When I was a kid, Mad Magazine was always referring to Pizza Pie, but being a Londoner, I wasn't familiar with the dish. It was not until I went to Uni that I was confronted with this abomination, but I soon grew to like it. Many years (and pizzas) later, we were on holiday in Italy, and neither of us spoke Italian. We fetched up at a small pizzeria in Chiavenna, on the way up to the Splügen pass into Switzerland. We asked (in fractured Italienglish with much arm waving, etc.) for two pizzas, one ham and one mushroom. What we got was two perfect ham and mushroom pizzas.
The first modern pizzeria in the US opened in 1905.[0]
The Harry Warren/Jack Brooks song is from 1953 (Dean Martin just sang it; they did the hard work). Clearly it was a compound word in the common vernacular by that point.
My OED says the first reference to "pizza-pie" that it could find is 1939. I've seen references on the internet for the root of the word dating back to 1918. See here.
My gut feeling is that, as with many food-culture derived words, we'll be arguing the actual origins (over pizza and beer, natch!) for a long time ... Unless someone comes up with an old, yellowed bit of paper with an authenticated publication date, of course.
This round's on me :-)
[0] Lombardi's, in NYC. Corner of Spring & Mott Streets. Interesting in that it's supposedly the oldest such joint in the US, but a mediocre pie IMO. That's not to say it's bad, it's not, but it's not worth traveling 40 miles for, either. Eat at your local independent and save a buck ... unless you've never had NYC-style pizza from a coal-fired oven, which makes it worth the experience if nothing else.
charcoal fired and ~450C on the stone, not sure about the air temperature to be honest as the air thermometer doesn't go high enough, but the stone is measured with one of those laser things.
Takes maybe 90 seconds- 2 minutes, the dryer mozzarella is melted and nicely browned in that time, and pulls extremely well, but the wet stuff is gooey and browning round the corners but certainly not stringy.
We normally make 5-6 20cm pizzas in a row as the last one is cooked by the time the first one is finished...
Also, cooks bacon from raw to crispy in 90 seconds.
To clarify, my "fresh" mozz for pizza is two days old ... I make it, then wrap it in one layer of cheese cloth and hang it in the walk-in for two days before using it. Drops the weight by about 25%, but retains the fresh taste and creamy mouth feel. You can do this at home in a standard fridge (stick a pan under it or you'll make a mess!). It'll keep for a couple days after hanging, if well wrapped.
Another method is to tear the cheese into roughly equal sized pieces and wrap in paper towels to remove the excess liquid. If your towels lend some flavo(u)r to the cheese, switch brands of towel. Or you can use large coffee filters, which are flavo(u)rless if stored properly (this gets spendy!). It takes about two hours to drop the same 25% as hanging, changing the paper a couple times.
If you are in a hurry, you can achieve similar results by placing about 6 pounds of #3 steel shot[0] into a large ziplock[1] and use that as a weight over the top layer of towels. The shot conforms to the cheese, giving it a more natural look and fairly uniform dryness level in the end result. You could probably use anything for weight (10" cast iron skillet comes to mind) if you don't mind a flattened look and non-uniform dryness. This takes about 20 minutes, changing the paper at the ten minute mark, to again drop the 25%.
I just fed the twelve adults who live on the Ranch lunch (featuring chivo243's variation on the theme ... Recommended). The three versions of fresh mozz were acceptable to all, with the hung in the fridge method getting the slight nod. Nothing was soggy. The store-bought dry mozz made especially for pizza came in a distant 4th, but was still quite edible.
Conclusion: Dry out your fresh mozzarella for best results!
[0] Any size shot will probably work, I had this on hand.
[1] I first put the shot into a 10 pound shot bag, and then put that into the ziplock.
You aren't supposed to use the wet mozzarella on pizza, it should be the grated dryer stuff.
According to the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana:
The buffalo mozzarella (chopped in slices) or the fior di latte (chopped into strips) have to be spread uniformly on the pizza.The grated cheese (if used) has to be spread on the pizza with a circular and uniform movement of the hand.
I believe that two (or more) consenting adults can do what they like, as long as they are not hurting anyone else it's not my problem.
Works for sexual orientation, religion and pizza toppings. I don't actually like pepperoni, but I wouldn't stop any one else eating it, and certainly not because some stranger on the internet didn't like it.
Has pizza sauce (with oregano, basil, black pepper, garlic) Italian sausage, made in Chicago, crispy bacon, fresh tomato slices and fresh jalapeño slices and shredded mozzarella cheese on a thin crust. Hit it with some fresh ground Parmesan when it comes out of the oven...
Now I've done it, gone and made myself really hungry before lunch!
"USAians might call them steak cut fries (I think)"
Pretty much, although that made me think of a restaurant I went to one time in Manhattan, Rothman's on 53rd Street, near the St Regis (where I was staying). I ordered a big slab of dead cow with "steak fries". What I got was indeed a big slab of dead cow, with what looked like a baked potato (and not a small one, either) sliced in four lengthways.
When I queried this oddity, the waiter confirmed that it was, really, their version of "steak fries".
Good steak, though.
Steak fries are wedges of a large potato, cut longitudinally. Take a half kilo Russet and cut it into eight equal pieces, skins left on. They are often oven baked, sometimes twice-cooked (see below). Nice with a steak, thus the name.
Most of the GreatUnwashed think of generic "fries" as the garbage they sell at fast so-called "food" joints the world over. Greasy salt bombs. Narsty.
The rest of us think of fries as pretty much the same thing you get down at your local chippy in size and shape, except we double cook them.
Start with Russets, leave the skins on (unless you're a wimp, in which case you can peel them). For best results, cut the night before and leave to soak in cold water until time to cook. Dry them and put into 325F (165C) oil until they just start showing a hint of colo(u)r, about 6-8 minutes. Remove, and set on a rack to drain as you continue cooking the rest of your spuds. Once this round is done, raise the heat to 375F (190C) and cook 'em again, this time until GB&D, about 2-3 minutes (play with it until YOU like the results!). Shake off excess oil, remove to a rack to continue draining, salt immediately, and enjoy.
I use a large dutch oven for this, cast iron works better than anything else. Find the setting on your range that will hold the oil at temperature. Don't try to chase the heat while cooking! Leave it at the setting above. Put the spuds in and let 'em cook. The oil will cool a bit, but don't worry about it. Wait until the oil comes back up to temp before putting in the next batch. Lather, rinse, repeat. Do it all over again for the second pass through the oil. Use enough oil so the spuds have a lot of room to move around, do NOT crowd the pot. Also, do not over-fill the pot with oil, remember that the spuds will displace the oil and the steam boiling out will create bubbels, which will further raise the level. I generally suggest not starting with more than half a pot of oil.
I use peanut oil or canola oil. Any high smoke-point oil will work. If you don't overheat the oil, you can reuse it. Once it's cool, run it through a filter to remove the bits. I use standard cone-shaped coffee filters that I first soak in water (the water wets the fibers, keeping the oil from doing the same and slowing down the drainage ... another tech-tip from my Grandfather). Store in the bottle you bought it in. It'll last longer in the fridge. I can usually manage several uses before it starts breaking down.
Hmm.
Rather than soak, just liberally wash the cut chips. The intent is to clear the starch. I tend to cut them into a bowl of water, swirl it, drain it, refill, swirl again.
For triple cooked chips, blanch the chips. For double-cooked chips, skip that step.
Initial fry, 3-6 minutes (depending how many chips you're making - 5-6 minutes for 1kg of raw potato) at 130C. Don't use canola oil, it's tasteless. Don't use peanut oil, it's an abomination. Use goose fat.
When the initial fry is complete the potatoes will be soft and have very little colour. This is good, it means they're cooking properly. Let them cool down.
Now they need 5-8 minutes (again, depending on weight) at 180C. You'll know they're ready, they'll have dark brown crisp edges, golden surfaces and that ideal blend of outer crunch with inner soft goodness.
Season to suit, serve with whatever the fuck you like, it'll be awesome anyway.
"The rest of us think of fries as pretty much the same thing you get down at your local chippy in size and shape, except we double cook them."
Any chippy or restaurant will double cook chips. Not only does it make a better chip, but the first cook part is done before opening so that the second cook results in a quicker process and fresh cooked straight on the plate/in the tray/wrapped for takeaway.
You're wrong on the oil though. Beef dripping is the ONLY way to go when frying chips!
Russeting is a skin condition of some apple and pear varietals. Because of this, many different apple cultivars have russet as a part of their name. It's more a description appended to a name than an actual name, though.
Russet Potatoes are widely grown world-wide, primarily for the mass-production of fries/chips/crisps, but they also makes a good all-around potato for home use. See http://www.pvmi.org/ for more than you ever wanted to know about potatoes.
Hopefully you didn't flat-spot anything unnecessarily.
What the fuck does Naples have to do with it?
Or have you bought into the bullshit that Naples was the first place that someone put food on top of a slab of dough and cooked it in an oven? Native Americans were doing that very thing over 4,000 years ago. So were the Egyptian pyramid builders.
Well, other people may well have stuck stuff on top of a slab of dough beforehand, but it wasn't a pizza, because the word pizza comes from Naples. If it's not a pizza, it's not a pizza. It might be a Pissaladière, or a foccacia, or whatever, but it's not a pizza, because that's not what it's called. For instance, something made from batter in a pan, with "barbecue sauce" and American "cheese" on it might call itself a pizza, in the same way I might call myself President of Earth. It doesn't make it a frickin' pizza.
I'm no purist myself (and I expect many Italians aren't either), so I'll quite happily eat a pizza that has "non standard" toppings on it (a Margherita pizza for example, should have only puréed tomato, buffalo mozzarella and basil on it), but a proper pizza consists of a thin piece of bread dough (properly made from OO pasta flour if you are really a purist), tomato sauce, mozzarella, and a small number of toppings, baked quickly in a hot oven (preferably a wood-fired oven with a clay floor).
Other sauces, or cheese that isn't mozzarella (other than additional cheese, as in a Quattro Formaggio), non-bread bases (Pizza Hut apparently use a batter), etc. mean it is not a pizza, but something else. This is no judgement on whether it is going to be edible or not.
When it comes down to it, though, I'll defer to Neapolitans about what they deem to be the defining dish of their city. After all, their city has almost certainly been around for a couple of thousand years longer than yours.
Or have you bought into the bullshit that Naples was the first place that someone put food on top of a slab of dough and cooked it in an oven? Native Americans were doing that very thing over 4,000 years ago. So were the Egyptian pyramid builders.
I'll just reiterate, that this isn't about who put a topping on bread first, but who invented the pizza, which isn't just defined as toppings on bread.
I'll also point out that Native Americans didn't have bread made from wheat (they cultivated maize instead); I don't think a tortilla quite qualifies as a pizza base, no mater how much a foodie youtube "influencer" might try to convince you it does, and also remind you that Naples has been around as a settlement since the neolithic (the name Naples comes from the name of the Greek settlement Neapolis in the second millennium BC), although they haven't had tomatoes to cook with for quite that long. Consumption of bread there would have been contemporary with that in ancient Egypt, but once again, bread isn't pizza.
Ordered a pizza in 1999, during the early days of the internet. Entered my credit card details, clicked submit and waited... I suspect that it just faxed an order to the local pizza shop. Anyway, my Thai yellow chicken curry pizza (goes well with beer!) arrived after 45 mins. The most amazing thing was not that the pizza combination was awful but that it arrived at all.
Yeah, no. Not according to Vint Cerf, Jon Postel et al. There were networks such as ARPANET, but not the Internet.
Perhaps you believe that The Grand Canyon didn't exist before the U.S. Congress officially established Grand Canyon National Park in 1919?
We called the ARPANET "the internet" at least by 1970, mainly because it had become an internet ... By 1974, the word "Internet" was even ratified in the RFCs ... See Cerf & Kahn's take on the subject in RFC-675 ... and note that the research (read "bullshit sessions") that resulted in RFC-675 started several years earlier. The name was already embedded in the collective psyche by then.
Even if you take 1974 as "the date", it was still 25 years old by 1999, which is well over half the age that it is now.
Regardless, 1999 was hardly the "early days", now was it?
"I believe that the first packets were exchanged within a year or two of that date."
Here's a picture of the specific page of the log:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/First-arpanet-imp-log.jpg
Alright, maybe I was being a bit picky :-)
My main point was that you would have had a lot more trouble ordering pizza via your computer in 1969 than in 1999. Networking had been around for a while, but the Internet as we know it today was if not in its early days at least in its early years, and still mostly a time-wasting toy. Maybe some things never change :-D
Worst Pizza I've ever had was 25 years ago. Iin Edinburgh In an Italian restaurant. During the festival. Took 40 minutes to arrive. Topping was unrecognisable. Base was burnt. Waiter not interested. I marched into the kitchen and dumped it onto the pass, burnt side up. That got results.
My worst pizza ever, both of us could even not eat, was in Paris, next to the Opera.
After entering the "Pizza" restaurant, I noticed every customer was apparently a tourist like us ...
Red flag !
As of today, I still suspect the Bolognese Pizza was dressed with dog or cat food. That bad ...
In the Arc/Opera/Louvre triangle, anything in plain sight will be a bit too touristy (and most not giving a gallic shrug for q.o.s), there are some good places hidden in alleys & frequented by locals if you can find them.
South bank - 7th Arr. had some nice places when out in town with the crew a decade or so ago.
My worst pizza was in London. Them listing it as an appetizer should have been the clue. It turned out to be a cracker drizzled (not uniformly spread) with tomato paste and a piece of Canadian bacon, for £6. Best meal I had while in London - Pizza Hut pizza.
Yes, I *am* an American, how can you tell?
For you puzzled Brits: "Canadian Bacon" is a Yank term for a lean cut of back bacon, most often the tenderloin. It is usually wet cured & smoked, and is more like a city ham than actual bacon. The term is almost never used north of the 49th parallel. It is an excellent pizza topping, if you can find a properly made version. (Hint: National brands aren't properly made.)
I wouldn't feed Pizza Hut pizza to my hogs. Narsty, narsty stuff. Barely half a step above that abomination known as Domino's.
I used to have NIGHTMARES after every time eating at a US PizzaHut!
Nightmares of drinking copious gallons of cold water! I could not get enough! My wife wondered why I was moaning so much in bed.
I finally figured out that it was THE SALT that PizzaHut dumps into its pizza! Unbelievable! Probably just so that the customers would buy more 3% American beer! UGH!
WOW! Maybe Pizza Hut ran an AS/400? ...And the RPG-II made the pizza-dough recipes...?
Who enters a command 56 times? Once is enough!
Pizza (select text) Ctrl-C Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return Ctrl-V Return
Or (for those of us who learned to use a computer, not just Windows)
Pizza Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return Up arrow Return
Other toppings are available, including pineapple.
There's a Questionable Content where one of the character's dad sends her a device from his space station with just a note saying "have fun"
So they press it a couple times and finally call him and ask. It's a device for requesting pizza delivered straight from orbit.
Of course they discover a ton of pizzas impacted on the roof from all the button presses.
Ah here it is: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3047
£2.50 small £3.50 big (I think anyway £1 different)
Someone said only 4 inch bigger, not worth it
I saw twice the area well worth it.
(10/2)**2 * Pi = 78
(14/2)**2 * Pi = 154
14 inch pizza is twice the size of 10 inch pizza
Not even the staff realised.
That was in 1990 ...
As a side note, Tony & Alba's still exists. You can still order over the Internet. They make good food, at a good price. But then, if you live within delivery distance you probably already know this ... Well worth patronizing if you ever visit near any of their locations. Highly recommended.
I worked with one of these 20 years ago. I suppose I was probably the "Systems Programmer" for it.
At one point the RPG-II programmers were having difficulty "transitioning from RPG-II to RPG-3. or was it 4? I forget.
So I suggested to the "Director" that we upgrade or at least "transition" to COBOL.
Nope! That would be... uh, a long leaning curve. They would have have all sorts of training courses.
Sheesh! So in a week or two, I learned RPG-3 (or was it 4?) and wrote a coupla programs for HTML integration - we had our own web-server running some Lotus-crap called "Domino" which I had to maintain, in spite of me secretly running Apache and IIS on my static IS Win2000 system.
HEY! Maybe Domino was the Pizza? I never thought of that!
Finally the CEO let me go, and, a 11 months later the company folded. Goodbye AS-400 system, Domino, RPG and the whole kit'n'kaboodle.
The president then retired to his luxurious home in the Florida keys.
The programmers? They got out of computer programming and became the 2000s' decade version of Uber drivers.
It was the second worse job I had in my life. You really don't wish to hear about the first- a COBOL programmer in the late 1960s! lol.
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