Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Has anyone noticed that their fries have gotten worse over the last year or so? Since day one in 1948 In & Out used a Shaver Keen Kutter for cutting their fries. Most of the high end steak houses and restaurants use the Keen Kutter because of their quality and unique design of the blades. The blades are thin & cut through the french fry rather then trying to "force" the potatoes through the cutting head with thick blades. They switched to what looks to be a "Nemco" machine or hybrid that has thick blades. When you apply pressure on the potatoes and try to push them through this thick blade design, the patatoe is forced through the cutting head. Were the blade makes contact with the potato it puts stress on the potato. When the cut portion of the potato is exiting the blades it wants to expand from the preasure of trying to get by the bigger blades. When this happens, the potato edges crack or break and allows oxygen to enter through these stress cracks. What does that matter you may ask? Now when the cut fries are being fried, the oil gets inside these cracks which enter the patoto and cook it uneavenly. Not to mention it changes the nutritional facts that have been the same for 60 years. I bet they didn't re-test the fries after they switched their process. I know notice that their a alot more broken little 1/8 & 1/4 picece fries on my tray.

I heard that over the years that the potato's that In & Out grow/buy have gotten bigger and didn't fit the Shaver cutting head, thus changing to a bigger head and thicker blade design. Consistency is key and after 60 years of the same good french fry that helped the company grow to what it is today... why change something that isn't broken.

Whenever the food is good and ready for me to eat it.

glad to see we're not the only ones on a european style schedule. i get home from work by 6 but dinner is rarely before 8, usually around 9. on the weekends we eat around 10. if we go out dinner reservations are usually at 8 to account for the cocktails/order taking/food delivery delay. growing up though, dinner was at 4:30 every day.

I eat between 5:30-6:30 and again around 11 PM. It's a wonder I'm such a stick person.

DH and I play scrabble almost every afternoon (yes, we are THAT old) so dinner is around 7-ish.

Late for me. I wait til my husband comes home from the hospital night shift, around 11:45pm if we want to eat together!

Usually anywhere between 8:30 pm and 10 pm. I can't eat before a movie or show because it will put me to sleep during the event.

Not a morning person. Get to office job between 10-11. Home around 7:00. Three-quarters drink a bottle of wine. Watch food shows. Cook dinner between 10 and 12. Finish bottle of wine or two. In bed around 1. I'd be happier in Europe.

around 5, since i'm usually up at 5-5:30 am everyday and rarely have time for a decent lunch...by 5 i'm ravenous!

long post ahead to answer the simple question for the above post

French Fries(FF) animal style like everything else on the "secret menu" came to be at the request of our customers. Before 2000, FF animals did not exist, animal style burgers did. In 2001-02, one customer must have asked some cashier if they could melt some cheese and put that on the FF. Thus the birth of the animal FF.

In 2002, we did not have button for animal FF on the order taking screen. We just charged the customer 40 cents for the two extra cheese and the cook would make the animal FF. There was also no policies on making FF animals. Some cooks melted chz on them, then put some fried mustard in the grill onions, added a little chop pickles along with the grill onions and spread. This was the true animal FF because it had the same extra condiments that went on the animal burgers.

The problem with this was that this is an extremely time consuming process. The FF has to come out early for the cook to make them animal style. It also took grill space to melt cheese. Not a huge deal when you made animal FF once or twice a month. When animal FF started spreading like crazy, they became very inconvenient.

The only way to make everything fresh and to order, is to have a very simple menu. One kind of bun, one kind of cheese, basic condiments. No bacon, sesame buns, chicken sandwiches etc. The cooks sees how the customer wants their burger and makes it that way. Animal FF takes a huge toll on the cook. They are fairly simple to make, but during a rush when the cook has to make some 80+ burgers/30min all with different condiments, they are just rhythm killers. They are wrenches in the cooking mechanism.

The company saw this too late and animal FF became much too popular for them to just say no when the customer ordered one. The are very few complaints about in-n-out as a company. The two big ones are lack of a menu variety and the other is wait time. The first one is never going to change because the INO foundation is built on fresh food made to order. The second one is caused by this ideology. A burger will take about 5 mins to cook from the time you order it, no matter what. During the rush this will increase and animal FF will not help. So the next best thing the company did to try and slow down the FF animal popularity was to make them very expensive.

A Double Double, THE all American Cheese, 100% beef patty, on slow rising true sponge dough with granulated sugar, with ace grade tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and secret spread cooked to order became the 2nd most expensive item behind some FF with 2 slice of cheese on them and some condiments. Imagine if FF animals cost $1.75 instead of $3+. The not so great wait time would be horrendous with the amount of FF animals made. This is why if you don't know about animal FF you never will, animal FF will never be advertised by the company and they will never ever appear on the official menu. Heck, they don't even advertise them on their official website on their secret menu tab.

So yea, they are expensive, and yea they are good. At least, some stores are now retrofitted with steam machine that will melt the cheese, making them a little easier to make, but still very time consuming. FF animals are the biggest thing to change for INO since they added Dr. Pepper in like 1997. Keeping it simple and fresh is the INO motto and FF animals are not simple. Just be glad they didn't axe them like the famous 5X5 and bigger burgers we used to make.

Thanks for reading and thanks for making my check possible every 2 weeks.

Try mixing up some cornbread with some chedder cheese then fill the peppers up about 3/4 full to allow for the bread to rise. bake them unill the cornbread is good and brown. SUPER

It's interesting to see how many people become oddly intolerant of appliances and gadgets they don't own. It makes me wonder why - it's not like appliances or gadgets attack people or actively do something else to deserve such acute hatred. I don't own a garlic press or a KitchenAid (and I don't need or want either one) and I could easily live without a dishwasher, but it would never occur to me to call these or other appliances "a total waste of space and money" if somebody else uses and enjoys them. If I don't have it - I haven't wasted either space or money, if somebody else has it and uses it - it's not a waste.

Yes, there are plenty of funny, silly and outright ridiculous appliances and gadgets out there (doughnut factory comes to mind), and I may not care for any of them, but you know what, if somebody bought it, likes it and uses it - good for them.

Heeey now...I love my rice cooker! I brought one to college, and its the first thing my sister bought for her new apartment!

We eat rice nearly every day, and while rice in a pot isn't that hard to make, rice in a rice cooker is perfect every time, you can set it and go about your life.
You can also make rice casseroles in it, you can make bread and porridge, oatmeal, etc.

It is the epitome of the quick, cheap, but warm and homey meal.

On the other hand, I wouldn't know what to do with a garlic press or a potato ricer. A fancy pants mandoline with the rubber safety grips and what not has no place in my house, but a cheapo Japanese Benriner does.