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Comment by dj_mc_merlin | Hacker News Reader

This is different. If you learn enough about Linux, you can install Arch in 15-20minutes no problem. Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.

You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.

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Exactly this.

You simply aren't going to speed up the chemical reactions that happen during cooking. Even if you do find a way, your result will often be different or the result of using ready-made ingredients at the store. (I can buy frozen caramelized onions, for example).

I think cooking times assume the ingredients are already at room temperature.

If you cook chicken taken straight from the fridge it'll take longer and cook more unevenly than room temperature chicken.

it also depends on the cut and what you cook too. If you only stir-fry chickens that has been diced small with high heat, (I think?) you can achieve it 3-4 minutes, however that requires extreme precision and I think also require good utensils with precise heating. Cooking it longer, ex 7-8 minutes with lower heat usually bring better result and far easier.

Deep-fry or boiling? I'm unsure. Steaming one? Surely you can't

Apparently, boiling one in clarified butter works OK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Biy5776ec

> You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.

Some of this is probably a difference between home and commercial kitchen equipment.

I know my stove doesn't have the same kind of heat output that a commercial stove would, let alone specialty equipment like pizza ovens or wok burners. And lots of home range hoods are awful for ventilation, which makes it even more impractical to cook at a high heat.

It's not just about the heat output, although that does make a difference (cooking edit: thin* steak on a weak electric stove is hell). There is no amount of heat that will penetrate the inner part of the chicken while not burning the outside cooking only 3-4 minutes per side (unless you reduce the thickness of the chicken via butterflying, as another commenter pointed out, but you don't want to always to do that).

I'm mostly thinking outside the scope of just this one example. Even good recipes have a lot of variability in cooking time. The differences between how hot people cook at home and how hot they cook in commercial spaces is one of the ones that's hardest to control for (unless you want to remodel your kitchen...)

> You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim.

Sure you are. meat thermometer, hot pan and a butterflied breast [0] will give you evenly cooked chicken in about 8 minutes.

[0] https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-butterfly-chicke...

OK, I'll admit butterflied chicken can be cooked that quickly. But basically all other forms of chicken take longer. For curry for example, even though I cut it into small pieces and it could be cooked only 8 minutes since you're going to cook it in the paste later, it's just not going to brown properly and the flavour is not going to be as good. Normal breasts or thighs take longer as well.

It's been a while since I made a meat-based curry (vegetarian now), but from when I was cooking with meat regularly there were a few things that helped hugely with that - hot pan (common theme, heh), and cooking in batches/not overcrowding the pan. You _definitely_ can't brown chicken for 6 portions of curry in one pan in 6-8 minutes, but you _can_ brown it in 2 (maybe 3) batches in 6 minutes per-batch.

Honestly though, by the time you're accurately gauging browning vs cooking meat, and eyeballing batch size vs pan size, you've moved well past the point of relying on cooking times from recipes.

Preheating the pan is part of the cooking time, IMO. In your recipe I would heat my pan for a good 3-4 mins to be sure the temp stays high after the chicken goes in.

I don't agree, in the same way that preheating an oven isn't considered part of the cooking time, or vegetable prep isn't considered part of the cooking time.

Fair enough. We have our opinions. For me the cooking time starts when I enter the kitchen and finishes when I serve the meal. It's the time I spent cooking the meal.

Your thinking is what enabled a generation of '20 minute meal' recipe books that actually take closer to 40 mins.

It's impossible to give an accurate estimate unless you're starting from the same place (and even then it's hard to give an accurate estimate when you're starting from the same place - how long does it take a pot of water to boil?)

My parents are an absoulte disaster for organising their kitchen, they have a fridge that is absolutely _rammed_ full with no order whatsoever, and a single pantry cupboard that contains cereals, vinegars, and everything else in one. On the contrary, my kitchen is organised very loosely by meal, while still structured and categorised. I can dice/slice veg for a full meal in the length of time it takes my partner to get the ingredients out of the fridge.

> Your thinking is what enabled a generation of '20 minute meal' recipe books that actually take closer to 40 mins.

Nah, that's just people lying about cooking times, like "caramelize the onions" in 3 minutes, and not measuring how long it actually took them to do the recipe.

Any reasonable estimate above 0 is more accurate than one that doesn't include prep time.

I don’t think any chef (or recipe author) would agree with you. If only because they have preheating pans all the time.

Also the actual pan matters, if you have a thick-bottomed cast iron pan that’s been fully preheated it might not even notice that you dropped produce on, whereas a thin teflon-coated aluminium pan will drop through the floor.

An other huge factor is overcrowding, especially pans.

Chefs use thin carbon steel pans which heat up and cool down very quickly. They also have much more powerful gas burners.

My advice is related to common domestic pans with heavier bottom and common domestic weak burners.

Agree that overcrowding is a huge issue especially with water-heavy ingredients like onions, peppers.

Just FYI you can easily cook a room temp chicken breast or thigh (or lots of them) 4 minutes a side directly below a broiler on a broiler pan, letting them rest covered for 5 afterwards.

Add a minute for the genetic freak 2+ inch thick ones.

You will need to pat the moisture off them first and brush with oil.

You may have changed the color of the meat and killed off the bacteria to make it safe to eat, but you didn't make good chicken. It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture. Sure you can put any food in an incinerator for 2 minutes and it's "cooked", but not really.

How do your want to define cooked then? cooked != tasty it just means it's no longer pink and will kill you with salmonella inside. Doesn't mean it's not dry or bland or any other implications

I want cooked to be something I want to eat. I don't eat at McDonalds, while the food is safe to eat, it is also gross.

Well, if we're getting into semantics we could maybe say cooked vs prepared, I'm not sure. There's obvious physical differences between burnt onions and caramelized onions. Similarly, there's obvious physical differences between scorched, dry, but safe to eat chicken, and chicken that has been prepared properly and is tender and juicy. In the context of this thread, we've been talking about cooking things as part of recipes, so the end result and quality is obviously important.

Considering that we are talking about cooking from recipes, I' assume that "cooked" means "palatable" - or at least, an attempt as such.

It still might be dry or bland, mind you, but more than the minimum needed to make it safe to eat.

> It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture.

This is true of dark meat like chicken thighs, but chicken breast is the exact opposite. Cooking at slowly at low (but still conventional stove or oven temperatures) will give you either juicy chicken with little to no browning or dried out chicken with sufficient browning. A chicken breast is like a single-serving steak - it requires fast cooking (although not as fast as a thin steak) to achieve proper browning without overcooking the interior.

The exception is non-conventional very slow methods like sous vide where the the meat is cooked for over an hour in a medium that is more or less the target temperature of the interior of the meat. Although this provides no browning so you'll still want to sear it very quickly over high heat.

If you'd like to see an extreme version of this principle in action, try J. Kenji Lopez Alt's grilled chicken cutlets: https://www.seriouseats.com/five-minute-grilled-chicken-cutl...

By butchering the breast so that it's very thin and cooking it 90% on one side you can get delicious browning and juicy meat genuinely in under 5 minutes. It's a pretty great hack.

> you didn't make good chicken

Great, thanks for your opinion, I'll forward it to the Chef that taught me.

> It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture.

Got it, there's only one way to cook chicken, good to know.

> Sure you can put any food in an incinerator for 2 minutes and it's "cooked", but not really.

Searing / Incinerating, definitely no difference there, reasonable response, I stand corrected.

> They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.

Doesn't make sense to me. I certainly don't choose a recipe based on the estimated time-to-complete.

In fact I generally click through a bunch of recipes, and pick and choose the ideas that sound as if they'll work. Felicity Cloake does this, in her "How to cook the perfect..." series. She consults a bunch of top cookbooks, tries several mash-ups, and feeds the results to a tasting panel. At least, that's what she says she does; I'm inclined to believe her.

Does make sense to me. I don’t want to combine recipes rely on my creative cooking skills, because I don’t have those skills.

If I want to make a certain dish I look for recipes, pick one and follow that. If a recipe takes 2 hours to prepare and I don’t want to spend 2 hours in the kitchen, I pick something that doesn’t take as much time.

I would be surprised if that isn’t the way most people use recipes.

But I usually pick a recipe from a cook book I own. Searching for recipes online is a shitty experience.

Not familiar with Felicity Cloake, but as a non-professional home-cooking enthusiast, mash-ups are my go-to when I'm trying new recipes that I'm pulling from online. Results are usually pretty good! Did a Greek pasta salad a couple nights ago that turned out really nicely.

Have been thinking about signing up for, or self-hosting some kind of recipe app to make managing it easier... as-is, I have a "recipes" bookmark folder, where each recipe gets a sub-folder with a bookmark for each referenced recipe. However, this approach suffers from linkrot, recipes are often poorly formatted, and it doesn't have anywhere for my notes to go.

True, in this extreme version that goes clearly against the laws of physics.

But without going there, I can clearly hear my mother answering me that once again "it's very simple honey, 20 minutes top", when asked how she did the lunch.

She consistently does this, yet when I copy everything she does, I'm lucky to get 40 minutes.

> Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.

Surely, you are dramatizing a bit here. Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?

Are you trying to actually learn Linux or just how to use Linux to get other work done. Learning how to use Linux to get work done doesn't require a 'need to fiddle' as you put it, but you're not going to really learn actual Linux (as in how the kernel and core operating system works and hangs together) without getting your hands dirty and breaking a lot of things along the way.

Agreed.

Well, these days you can do use VMs to destructively 'learn Linux' without messing up your real system.

Yes, but do you actually need to know that? I know that, I've been using Linux since the whole thing fitted on four 1.44MB floppies. I don't *care* though, and if my machine is fatally screwed up I just bust out the latest Ubuntu LTS, flatten, and reinstall.

I haven't got time to muck about with rescuing a broken system. I've got stuff to do.

Yes, but do you actually need to know that?

Do you actually need to know JavaScript? Or C? Or Japanese?

As I said, if Linux is just the OS you use to do something else, then no. If your job/hobby is to actually develop Linux or tools that tie very tightly to Linux and how Linux operates, then yes.

Okay, but if your job is actually to develop Linux and Linux tools, you'd be better off with a sensible distro like Ubuntu.

You're not productive if you're constantly having to fiddle about with broken tools.

No, just personal experience. I started learning Linux as a young teenager and have broken dozens of installations (breaking system python, deleting /usr/ via rsync, doing an incomplete system update, writing a love letter to my boot sector, etc. etc.)

Eventually I have failed in so many ways that there are not a lot of ways I can fail now that I don't know how to rescue myself from. Also I've learned what not do to keep things saveable.

> Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?

Why else would you use Linux? This fiddling is literally necessary to learn it. Otherwise you have to ask somebody else for help, who has done the fiddling.

> Why else would you use Linux?

Because you just want to get work done, or play your game or browse the web etc?

Yes, learning Linux is fun (for the kind of people who find this fun). But we don't expect people who just want to get on with their lives to eg break Windows or MacOS a lot, either.

I'm pretty close to this at work since about 1/3rd of my job is helping the non-Linux people deal with Linux. Programming is their 2nd language so to speak, and the use of Linux is incidental, it's just what's easiest to give them to keep everything in our company compatible.

They require a person who knows Linux in order to keep working. It's not optional -- they just wouldn't be able to get everything running otherwise without it breaking every couple of days. The fixes they find without us usually end up masking the problem and causing a truly unfixable problem later.

This is one of the biggest flaws of Linux IMO -- you have to dedicate yourself to learning it to be able to use it as a daily driver effectively.

So: if you don't have to, and you don't know how, you shouldn't use Linux at all. There's no point, just use macOS. The macOS people eventually fix their problem on their own anyway since it's so standardized.

What are your people doing that they break stuff all the time?

I found I had more trouble with macOS than with Linux.

I mostly use ArchLinux, and I don't have those weird problems you are talking about.

I once logged into a ONE HOUR OLD ubuntu install for it to randomly decide that my system font should be 6pt, but not everywhere, and there was no way to change it through any settings panel. Not knowing in what magical text file that setting, if it even had one, was hidden, my only choice was to reinstall.

I guess Arch Linux is a lot saner, they just have one place to change things: the configuration files; and that one place is well documented and there's no magic going on. No weird settings panels that try to be smart.

That's interesting. Did either Ubuntu or Arch Linux patch GNOME to read configuration at different places? Doesn't Ubuntu also have configuration files that actually store the configuration (while the settings panel would be just the UI to the config files)?

At any rate, how are you sure that this bug only affects Ubuntu but not Arch?

I don't use GNOME, so I can't comment. I just use XMonad as a light weight window manager, and don't bother with any 'desktop environment'.

I don't know how Ubuntu nor GNOME store their configuration. I suspect they have lots of plain text config files, but they might also have other formats like databases etc? I think the more important part is that they try to 'magically' do much of the config for you, and sometimes that magic breaks.

I found 'etckeeper' quite useful, it sticks your /etc in a git repository and makes commits when something changes. So you can at least review what just changed that must have broken your config. (I use etckeeper on Arch, but it seems to be also available on Ubuntu.)

> Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.

People bother to do that?

Just wipe, reinstall, and run your postinst scripts to restore everything you need.

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