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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to be "ramen profitable", you might as well put the extra effort in and enjoy yourself. =)

Careful though - All the time spent researching / cooking / perfecting this food may eat into your ramen profitability.

I recently took up cooking and if you get serious, it gets expensive, specifically in the following ways:

1) Stocking up - Initially buying spices ($4 each), pots, pans, trays (a decent set will run you $400), a good knife($80) which you will eventually need, other staples ($a bunch)

2) Experimenting - You'll get stuff wrong a lot. You'll ruin food. You'll buy more food. Sometimes it's expensive food like steak.

3) Showing Off - When you figure out you can cook something that is noticeably better than rubber, you'll want to cook for your friends. They will like the food and thank you, but they won't always remember to leave cash behind.

4) No more junk food - Cooking the good stuff makes you appreciate good food, and by appreciate I mean spend more money on.

I find cooking to be a lot like programming. There are tons of options and methodologies and evangelists and opinions, but when it comes down it, the thrill of creating something (even something palatable only to you) is unbeatable.

For buying food check out local salvage food stores. I've worked a tiny bit at one, and my mom uses them a lot. You can save a lot on high quality food.

Don't let the name scare you off, salvage just means that other shipments are better suited to retail. The reasons the retail grocery store sent back the shipment range from cans being dented to one jar being in the same box as a broken jar and getting water damage on the label. Or the food could be nearing its expiration date.

Since the food is being returned to the warehouse, some bad food occasionally slips through. But most stores are very good about checking for expired or bad food, and nearly all problems with food quality are very obvious as long as you check the date.

Food quality can be very good. If it is being run as a health food store, you'll basically be getting some of the food from places like Trader Joe's and Wild Oats for bargain prices. The stores are also good if you want to buy bulk ingredients. Variety is usually good, but selection isn't. Since the stores are at the mercy of other stores for their produce, you can't expect to find a specific brand in a store at a specific time. And you also can't really expect to find a product in the store just because you had previously bought it.

Salvage stores might not be for everyone, but they can save you a lot of money on high quality food. Some food may be selling at or below wholesale. So it is at least worth checking out.

Here's a list of stores by state. I have no idea how accurate the list is, but I recognize about half of the stores in my state.http://www.frugalvillage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97055

Or you could get involved with an farm coop. I have no idea how it is price wise, but I think it is cheaper than a grocery store. The food is locally grown, and can be organic, so it is usually high quality. How a coop usually works is that you pay them a flat fee every month and they send you seasonal produce as they harvest it.

Like many hobbies, you can make it really expensive, but you really don't need to. A few pots, a good-sized cast-iron skillet for less than $20, a decent knife (I like Chinese vegetable cleavers), a paring knife, a few wooden spoons, a cutting board or two. That's enough to start out, and (as with programming), starting small can give you a better idea what you actually need.

Alton Brown's _Gear for Your Kitchen_ (http://www.amazon.com/Alton-Browns-Gear-Your-Kitchen/dp/1584...) is a pretty good equipment overview.

Also, The Wok Shop (http://www.wokshop.com) has a lot of good equipment for very reasonable prices.

"Initially buying spices ($4 each)..."

Let me recommend Penzey's:

http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/shophome.html

You'll get vastly better spices and herbs than you would at the store, for half the price (less if you buy in larger quantities). Every year, I shop the retail store in my hometown, and walk away with all the spices I need for a year (20 or 30 different kinds) for about $60. It's slightly more if you have to get them shipped, but still way cheaper than the megamart.

Penzey's is nice as a nationally available place, but I've had better luck getting spices locally. There's an Indian market that carries several spices for shockingly cheap, and they're quite fresh. You can get tons of other great stuff at ethnic grocery stores, too: http://ask.metafilter.com/117514/Interesting-foods-in-ethnic...

One of the local health food stores bags their own spices, and they have pretty good turnover. That might be more hit or miss, but worth a try.

I recently took up cooking and if you get serious

Don't take this the wrong way, but I find this to be a very puzzling sentence. To me, cooking your own food is a normal way of life, not something you "take up." I'm in my early 40's and I've been cooking since I was about 10 years old. My 8 year-old son helps me make bread and some meals all the time. It's not rocket science and it doesn't take expensive ingredients or tools. It was only in the last few years that I even had a set of knives that I could say were "good."

This morning I spent about $5 on a McDonalds breakfast (yeah, yeah, I know!). For about that same $5, I plan on making falafels with tzatziki sauce and pita bread for dinner tonight for me and my wife (and the kid if he'll eat it). Infinitely healthier and tastier than McSuck and feeds more for the same cost.

Don't make feeding yourself sound more complicated than it is!

I agree with all of this (cooking is my most expensive hobby), but bear in mind that your point is the entire thesis of the Slate article.

If you haven't read it all the way through, I highly recommend it. Something about the way it's written just seemed right for Hacker News.

I generally try to avoid competing with large capital-intensive factories manned by Chinese peasants to see if I can beat their food production while fumbling around inexpertly in my understocked kitchen and losing about $1.50 of imputed income a minute.

(A long way to say "I do not roll my own ramen". I kind of feel a little lazy that I barely even cook my own ramen anymore, but I know the business case for it is pretty solid, on the same logic. Preparation and cleanup time is so wasteful...)

I try to avoid eating things that come from large capital-intensive factories manned by Chinese peasants.

Because you don't generally like it, because you think it's unhealthy, because you don't want to help the Chinese get ahead, or for some other reason?

"Factory" is the word I like least in that term.

It is a mistake to take 'revenue forgone' too far. You would not (usually) spent that time in paid employment, so you haven't foregone that time.

Anyway, no need to get too fancy. If you don't enjoy cooking, don't do it. anyway:

"I take it as a given that everyone knows better than to quit their job—any job—to take up cracker-baking, so I attached no value to time."

You can easily beat their food production. Just realize that you're not beating them on price, you're beating them on taste.

And I have rolled my own ramen, or at least my own soba noodles :-)

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