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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Restaurants have tried to keep prices level, and for some things it is now cheaper to get it at a restaurant than at the grocery store.

Dominos with coupon is now cheaper than frozen pizza around here.

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Getting the ingredients to make a pizza yourself will be far cheaper and tastier than both of those options.

Not in regards to time.

This is only true if in that hour it takes to make pizza yourself, you actually increase your lifetime earnings by more than the cost difference between store bought and homemade pizza.

Sure, if you enjoy cooking or you don't consider your time as valuable, the math chacks out

That often isn't actually the case unless you make lots of pizza - for example with hamburgers I can't make one for myself cheaper than the local bar, because I can't buy a single slice of tomato or five leafs of lettuce. I can get a single patty at the meat counter ($7/lb, so about $2 usually), but can't buy a single bun or a slice of cheese.

You can buy ground beef in bulk for much less than $7/lb and freeze it. You can buy blocks of cheese and refrigerate them. You can refrigerate/freeze buns bought in bulk. You can buy several tomatoes at a time and use them for other purposes before they go bad (salads, salas, pizzas, etc.) Same goes for lettuce and pretty much any other ingredient except defrosted sashimi grade fish or live lobsters.

How does defrosted buns taste?

I wish I could buy them one by one or two by two ... four seems like such an odd number of buns. What about families of 1,2,3 and 5.

They taste fine, as long as you toast them and don’t let them get freezerburned/use them quickly enough (within a week and a half) that you just refrigerate rather than freeze. Good buns (i.e. without processed ingredients or preservatives) generally only come in <=4 packs anyway; the 8 packs are mostly processed crap that can sit out for a couple weeks without going moldy.

Grill them in an oven, don't microwave. They are as good as fresh and crunchy.

Some places even let you buy the "restaurant" or "catering" frozen bread/buns that are pre-cooked but not fully baked. So they're risen, half-baked and frozen, ready to be "baked" from frozen by the final restaurant/caterer. That's how restaurants do it, they don't all bake or buy fresh-bread every day.

Ye not being able to buy stuff at whatever quantity is annoying and probably a huge reason for waste.

The biggest problem with hamburgers is the bread which I can't seem to get in packs of one or two. Lettuce and tomatoes you can use for any meal but if you buy 4 buns you either eat hamburger half the week or throw them away.

Yeah buns are the most annoying - I wish I had a local bakery where I could buy ones or two.

I've taken to using buns for sandwiches (extra buns around an egg is a decent breakfast).

Cheese lasts a long time in the fridge, and even iceberg lettuce does as well. My local burger/micro-brewery has been sliding in quality for the last two years and I finally reached my tipping point. Normally, it's about $12 for a 1/3lb burger and fries there.

So I found a local butcher who makes a 'steakhouse' grind (chuck, brisket, short ribs) for about $7/lb. Two slices of cheddar are about a buck for non-Kraft cheese, buns and condiments are about another buck. Takes me about 9 minutes to cook at home, and I have a custom, super fresh and hot burger that tastes better than anything I've every had at a restaurant. Now I do miss out on fries, but eh, chips will do as a replacement. At the end of the day, I have a burger and chips for about $5, plus leftover stuff for other sandwiches. Throw in a decent beer, and I'm still cheaper than the microbrewery. And no driving required.

Of course, I have to do the difficult part of cooking. /s

An idea for the fries: an air fryer would let you make a small batch of fries without having to use a lot of oil for deep frying.

> I can't buy a single slice of tomato or five leafs of lettuce.

Hit up the salad bar for this stuff if your grocery store of choice has one. It's usually measured by weight, and it is much cheaper and less wasteful.

That'd be a great idea if Covid hadn't given them the excuse to get rid of them all (everywhere I know that has a salad bar has disappeared it).

Cooking for one in the US with ingredients that aren’t laced with preservatives is incredibly expensive, especially if you live in a city. I found it to be the case even 6-7 years ago that it was cheaper to eat out every night than it was to cook.

This is true (unless you're okay eating the same thing as leftovers for a week straight); cooking for two makes it a lot easier and opens up more options.

Thankfully I'm fat enough that "cooking for two" is the default :)

Fat or not fat, there is a point where pork shoulder day in and day out ceases to be appealing.

A+.

I only really eat chicken, so my dog counts as an interested party with regards to meals. It doesn't take much effort (eg don't sauce her food, nothing fried, lots of rice and veggies in the rice cooker) and she is always thrilled for the variety.

I blew a friends mind one lunch when we stopped at the store to get dog food - by pointing out the giant bag of frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts was cheaper per pound than the dog food.

Just be careful about making sure they're truly boneless; I was always taught to not give dogs even boneless chicken (unless it's part of actual dog food) due to the risk of bone fragments.

This doesn't seem terribly surprising. Even a hole-in-the-wall restaurant probably has better economies of scale ingredients-wise than even a large household. On the other hand, restaurants charge for their labor - and if a restaurant meal is cheaper than cooking at home, then it's yet another suggestion to me that restaurant workers are underpaid.

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