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Comment by bl4ckm0r3 | Hacker News Reader

"Of course, it still is cheaper to make food at home. A chicken patty, a bun, and some lettuce and mayonnaise cost maybe a dollar or so overall. A small handful of frozen fries, far less than a buck. You just have to take the time to put it all together, which we usually do."

really not sure where you can buy those items for a dollar, and if you can find them, not sure you should eat them.

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Yeah. The chicken patty in particular, it is incredibly hard to find frozen chicken patties that are cheap and taste even acceptable, let alone good.

I want these under $1 tasty chicken patties.

Costco - or whatever wholesale club is near you.

Costco is a store, not a product. They sell Kirkland/own brand which aren't under $1/ea and other brands like Tyson which taste awful.

What specific PRODUCT at Costco are you saying both taste good while costing under $1/ea?

They have hot dog and bun which would average out under a Buck I think.

Or you can get it hot with a drink for $1.50.

Even the cheap ones taste good if you deep fry them.

Eddie Murphy has the definitive counter point to that argument: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e9nb8ffIYl0

An eight pack of buns is $1-2

Frozen pack of chicken Pattie's is cheap

Mayo

Head of lettuce is a dollar

You can't make one sandwich cheap but you can make eight cheap

Amortized cost!

And I can make 1000 even cheaper. But I don’t want 8 chicken San who he’s by the time the ingredients are going bad.

This is just one of many things wrong with this article that I had high hopes would explain how to find the optimal pricing, but really just shirks that research off.

> Then again, most successful major corporations are run by heartless conservatives. The companies run by bleeding-heart liberals all went out of business.

Ok, maybe save me the time on the article and put winners like this at the top next time.

If you live alone, I don’t know if I want to eat 8 hamburgers before those ingredients go bad.

no one forces you to consume 8 frozen patties at once. Especially since they already are frozen, why not keep them in that state until you crave burgers next time?

Ok, that is the meat… but what about the buns, the lettuce, tomato, etc?

Having a house with two small eaters we pretty much had to give up all fresh produce that we weren’t going to consume or preserve immediately because it goes bad too fast and isn’t worth the waste.

There’s something to be said for the economics of moving enough volume to enable eating fresh.

Buns can be frozen pretty easily. And regarding the fresh ingredients ... why not just buy a single medium sized tomato and consume just that one? Or buy a big lettuce (which usually isn't very expensive) and make a salad as a side dish?! (honest question: have you ever prepped food before?)

Yes, I buy and cook all the food for my family of four. However, I remember there were a lot of food items that I could never really make work for myself when I lived alone because I could never eat it fast enough to get through it before it went bad.

It is a lot easier now that I have four people to feed, although the issue now is more that our two kids are insanely picky eaters and it is so hard to find meals everyone can eat.

What you describe in your first paragraph is something I hear very often from people that always eat out and don't want to learn how to cook their own food, because for them it's not worth it, due to the reasons you mentioned. I'm really curious, what are the items that you couldn't make work living by yourself? I personally cannot remember many of these instances back when I cooked just for myself. Most of the food items I had could be frozen or turned into a dish that in the end could be frozen well.

The big reason I almost never eat bread at home is because I'd either have to throw out most of it or freeze it. Of course, I will freeze it to avoid wasting it but frozen bread is really inconvenient and the taste and texture are unappealing and it really needs to be toasted to be edible but it still tastes off.

So I end up just not buying bread for the house.

Maybe we're talking about different kinds of bread (I'm from Germany), but freezing bread here is really common (almost all the old people do that who live alone) and bread is one of the foods that freeze really well. It's similar to freezing rice, after thawing it's almost as good as fresh. (without toasting it or so, just plain bread)

I just looked up the prices at Walmart and the cheapest I can find is $1.30 for just chicken+bun. These are bargain basement chicken patties, probably not very tasty. Of course, this is assuming you can eat the entire package before they goes bad. You also run into the problem of not being able to buy the same amount of patties and buns due to package sizes, and when you want to add lettuce you have to buy an entire head so you'll have to plan ahead to use the rest of the lettuce.

I really wouldn't want to eat frozen french fries either, they are just really bad. Might as well make something more edible as a side like macaroni salad.

I guess my point is that only if you're making food for a large family or are a really big eater then the supermarket is cheaper. Otherwise, don't feel bad for "wasting" money at McDonald's. I don't have a horse in this race though, I'm a vegetarian, I don't eat this stuff.

I just bought 1kg of chicken breast in the UK for £6 from a local supermarket. I'm pretty sure it's cheaper in the US.

And that's real chicken, not reconstituted shit.

A kilogram of fries is like £1.

From what I understand, British supermarkets are insanely cheap when it comes to food. You can't usually get even remotely similar prices in the US.

That hasn’t been my experience. Something were cheaper (converting GBP to USD) but it was usually only ~10%. Other things were more expensive.

Which store?

I was just window shopping in a few towns in the UK. Local stores and places like Sainsbury. Comparing staple items to Safeway and other US stores.

Prices may have change recently.

Sainsbury's is up to 2x the price for basic items (compared to Aldi, Lidl and Asda). Atomic Shrimp has interesting budget survival videos with 3 meals per day mostly from shopping value chain supermarkets, as well as direct comparisons between them.

Similar to Safeway in the US prices are much higher than budget grocery stores.

So, how much is the thread-starting 1kg of actual chicken breast for example?

To be absolutely fair: A chicken breast is not a breaded chicken patty and isn't really a good substitute to a fast food sandwich. Part of the appeal of fast food is the lack of thought that goes into prep. Basic warm and serve items from the grocery store - prepared patties and prepared fries(chips!) - is the comparable solution.

You'd have to likely cut, tenderize, and bread the breasts before shallow frying in a pan and heat up some oil to fry the fries/chips in. The patties and prepared chips can just go in the oven while you wait.

I literally just chucked 1kg in a dish with some oil on top and turned the oven on for a bit. I now have multiple servings.

Do what you want, but be honest about it.

price per KG (less any sale) is about double that what you paid.

and buying at small quantities can be even double that.

if you were comparing price of mcdonalds chicken burger to a plainish chicken breast, the 2 arent the same at all, which the previous poster was commenting on.

to turn that raw chicken breast to something close to McDs chicken burger requires quite a bit of time and additional ingredients.

on the fries, i agree. you can buy a KG of shoestring fries for 2-3$, with some salt are the same as mcd fries for the most part

if doing a raw ingredient comparison, buying at scale of 1KG is definitely cheaper.

The price of oil to deep fry is not cheap. Deep frying consumes a lot of oil and if you don't do it often, it is not cost effective.

And to have them taste as good as McD's, you'll at the least have to blanch and fry them twice with a freeze in between. If you cut your own fries, you should be doing this because it is awesome.

https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/mcdonalds-reveals-beloved-f...

Also if you don’t go through at least some of the hassle the fries will kinda suck. I mean it won’t be bad, it’s still potato salt and oil, but “fresh cut fries” will be limp and soggy unless you do the prep work.

Why would you even want to make it into a lesser foodstuff?

It would be cheaper, not more expensive, to pad it out so that you end up with like 50g of chicken and 50g of bread or whatever.

its not a lesser food (well maybe specifically mcdonalds), its different food.

are you arguing there is no point to transformative cooking to make something diff as it would be lesser than it originally was?

thats like saying why bother trying to make an apple pie, when you can just eat apples.

also your proportions are whack, have you had a breaded chicken burger? for the most part its externally coating the chicken breast patty with a breading/seasoning mixture and frying it.

you arent padding the meat mixture like say a meatloaf.

No, I'm saying that the stuff you add makes it cheaper per gram.

A McD's burger has hardly any actual chicken. You need to compare like for like. The cheap ones are even made from mechanically recovered meat.

An apple pie is cheaper than apples.

What are we even talking about? This is just funny.

I am being honest about it. Go ahead and tell folks to just make something else with chicken. But it isn't the same thing as a breaded chicken sandwich. Which you'd also get multiple servings of.

Nobody is trying to tell you that you can't have a completely different meal for less than the cost of a McDonald's chicken sandwich.

At my local store in CA (cheapest non-bulk prices, Costco is cheaper but more awkward perhaps, also shopping there takes 3x longer) it’s $6 for 1 lb of chicken breast and $3 for 1 pound of fries. So that’s around double your prices.

In Romania, frozen chicken nuggets are about $4.2 per 300g. I'd split that in two portions.

In the US, a 20-piece Chicken Nuggets (320g) from McDonald's is around $7.25. Not a big difference.

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