Danish was a fair choice but your buns and burgers were premium stuff, expect premium prices Mr. Ultimate burger
If you had bought normal store brand buns instead of artisan brioche, they are a third of the price. You are paying 2.50 per veggie burger pattie instead of a bit more or less than a dollar per pattie in morning star and great value brands. 5 dollars for a Danish that size is not ludicrous, but I bet you could have shopped around better for that too. You could have cut the total price in half at least if you were paying attention to prices and brands. Not saying that prices aren’t getting out of hand, but it doesn’t look like you even tried.
Well, those are some fancy burgers… Worth the money if you have it, IMO, but not something I’d buy on a budget. I usually get the Morningstar Farms chipotle black bean burgers, which Costco sells in a big box for a good price. They aren’t trying to be indistinguishable from meat (which isn’t a priority for me anyway) but they’re greasy (in a good way) and delicious.
Plus the Morningstar burgers have the rare advantage of being microwaveable. (I suppose you can technically microwave anything, but they’re good after being microwaved.) I’m not just saying that because I’m lazy - I have a little electric grill I can use, but I don’t need to for them and it’s nice to save a little bit of time that way.
Beyond burgers are gross. Impossible are the best
Buhhhhh beyond is just nasty, I’ve tried preparing it a bunch of different ways and it always comes out nasty. There’s just some flavor I can’t cover no matter how much seasoning is on there. Eventually you just cover it in hot sauce so you don’t waste food.
My main issue with it is the texture. Maybe something in the flavor too, but it just feels odd in my mouth. Impossible I basically can’t tell it’s not meat.
Morningstars don’t even need to be eaten like a hamburger. A little red wine vinegar, a few drops of olive oil, and a light sprinkling of Italian herbs turns that into some gourmet shit.
Morningstar burgers are the best ones I’ve tried
Artisan brioche buns. Plant based burgers are more expensive then the real thing for some reason (and full of salt). That Danish is a ripoff.
The reason is that the US spends a ton of money subsidizing the beef industry. Beef would be a hell of a lot more expensive if they didn’t.
True~ish. Farmers get subsidies in general, not just ranchers. But this is also Hamburger we are talking about. If the meatless patties were to replace the steak in a steak sandwich, they’d be more comparable in “price for function” comparison. The meat in hamburger patties is recovery from more expensive cuts and is basically designed to be cheap while the meatless patties are specifically designed to replace them.
It’s like building a small fence with pallet wood vs. what you’d buy at a lowes or something. Neither is gonna be priced at the premium of a boutique lumber mill or restaurant, but their inception doesn’t startvevenly.
Seeing as how most farmers don’t make much at all for their products, I wonder who those subsidies actually go to.
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as always: big corporations headed by extremely rich people
It’s so sad how many posters would rather blame OP for spending an extra dollar on better bread and veggie patties rather than actually acknowledge the blatant price gouging on food. The idea that everyone should only be buying the cheapest ingredients is just stupid. No one is living a fulfilling life eating nothing but cheap beans and rice everyday, and food prices have been ridiculous for a while now.
I miss the good ol days where inflation was so low, you could pick fruit off a vine/bush/tree and it was free
Nowadays, you have to pay HOA just to get a smell of that community cherry tree
The point is that it’s all processed and premade, that’s why it costs so much. Make your own beef patties with ground beef and some seasonings, just bake a damn dessert for once and stop getting the fancy artisanal bread and just go with whole wheat.
Nothing about that requires eating rice and beans, you just don’t want to accept that some shit requires effort and when you outsource that you pay more.
Yeah food costs an insane amount, but you don’t have to buy the “we did the work for you” tier of food if your income can’t handle it. You’re not entitled to having everything done for you. Learn to goddamn cook.
The biggest saving would actually be the buns I would bet.
You could make your own 8 burger buns for like 10 cents.
I can rarely find a pound of ground beef for under $9 now unless buying in massive bulk. Even produce has gotten insanely expensive in the last few years. Sometimes the raw ingredients are so expensive it’s cheaper to buy the processed shit… Idk how anyone less fortunate can stay sane in the grocery store. Buying raw ingredients and cooking isn’t a cheat code to save money.
I don’t know where you are but a one pound package of 90% lean ground beef at my supermarket (Kroger) in Denver is $4.97
Same store, Gardein® Ultimate Plant-Based Burger Patties, package of 2 (8oz total) is $4.99
I’m in the SF bay area. Like I get that it’s high cost of living and high wages, but even so doesn’t justify such a huge price difference. I guess just some pretty crazy price gouging
You aren’t looking hard enough. California has decent prices on lots of food because the farm is only hours away. There’s no $9 ground beef unless you get it from the farmer’s market. Also, just go to Berkeley Bowl.
I go to Berkely Bowl for niche ingredients I can’t find anywhere else, and the produce is often cheaper and better quality, but meat seems roughly the same and everything else in the store has at least a $1 markup. Also I’m not going to sit in an hour of traffic after work just to maybe save a buck on meat while immediately offsetting that saving in the gas it took to get there. It’s not always as easy as “just go to Berkely Bowl bro”.
Prices have objectively increased in the last three years that can’t be attributed to COL increases or inflation. The only thing left is profit.
The people that work in your grocery store need to afford to live in your high cost of living area, too. That means the stores have to pay them more which means they have to charge more. The same goes for the drivers that deliver the groceries to the store, the people that work in the warehouses of the suppliers, etc. It’s higher cost of living all the way down.
The same store was doing fine on half the price of groceries three years ago. How can the poor mega corporation grocery store ever survive? Doesn’t anyone ever think about the poor stock? And no, wages haven’t doubled since then
There is nothing unfuflfilling about beans and rice. This is the staple diet of almost a billion people. We are just so far removed from reality that we think of a healthy diet as a terrible punishment.
You did not understand my comment very well. Beans and rice are great staple foods, I love them. A well rounded diet involves more than just beans and rice.
Beans and rice yummy
fartsinfarts againmyoh my another one bites to dusttummyOn a more serious note didn’t early humans live a hunter gather life style eating both meats fish plants and vegetables I mean there’s alot of evidence that shows that our ancestors lived hunter gather life styles also I’m fairly certain that most people didn’t just eat beans and rice for billons of years
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/resource-library-hunter-gatherers/
Literally all modern evidence points to the healthier tribal and nomadic humans having animal-based diets.
Healthier teeth, healthier skin and hair, longer lifespans, better musculature.
I mean that was my original point but I don’t think I portrayed that correctly at all early humans lived hunter gather life styles I think that’s quite obvious at this point especially with all the scientific evidence pointing toward it plus moving around alot across continents and having to go out and hunt fish and forage for there food meant that they were way healthier stronger and fitter as you said as there getting a healthier diet and lots of exercise
what op said that for billons of years we lived of “beans and rice” which makes no sense whatsoever although I could be wrong I know beans on there own have a good selection of the nutrients you’ll need to sustain yourselve but im not to sure on rice plus I’m fairly certain you can’t eat rice and beans forever you’ll have to supplement it with something as well
Plus I haven’t read anywhere about humans sustaining themselves for billons of years on just a diet of beans and rice
It’s alright, we know what you mean.
I actually said a billion people live on it, but why let reading get in the way of a defensive rant about meat.
And why actually bother to listen to and connect with another human being when you can snap back with a snarky comment instead?
The above persons whole comment is a reaction to something completely different from what I said. Was there an attempt to listen and connect on their part? Not really.
When a bad hunt means your kids starve plants seem like a much safer option.
Human ancestors had a varying diet that was regional and included bugs and wild plants and yes some animal protein. There are some estimates that they regularly consumed like 100g of fiber a day
What a sucker, seed packets to grow your own Barley and wheat come out to 0.0003c per seed! Just grow your own crops NOOB
Is there a frugaljerk community yet?
Man, you said it jokingly and I truly chuckled but more and more the frugal community turns into that for the simplest things like, I don’t know:
OP: I love my Dr. Browns cherry diet soda brings as it’s my little piece of heaven and sincerely would like to find alternatives as is crazy expensive compared to cherry vanilla Dr. Pepper, that doesn’t taste as well, what can a dude do to get ahead of this?
Community : I’ve started bartering homemade syrups with neighbors for other home-grown or homemade items. It’s a fun community-building activity and we all save money, you just need to grow organic non GMO crops of cherry or other fruits and gather for harvest once a year to get the sugar cane and fruits to make the syrup.
Community 2: I’ve recently scouted all 223 bodegas supermarkets and drink emporiums in my town and took note of the price of individual cans, next week I’m going to the distributor to place an order equivalent to a sizeable amount of all cans on display to corner the market and resell the cans I have at an exuberant markup that will cover my habit and imagine all that I’m saving by buying in bulk!
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I get a sack of rice, a couple avocados, dry beans, frozen broccoli and corn, lime or two, bunch of spices if you don’t already have. Whatever Mexican spices recipe online but definitely get smoked paprika it’s straight up drugs. This will cost more than the burger set in the picture but it makes more meals.
Instant pot rice, instant pot seasoned beans with a second inner pot, 1/8 of tall wide mouth mason jar each of rice and beans, arbitrary amount of broc corn and cubed avocado leaving about 1/8 of jar as air, tablespoon or so of lime juice. Cool the jars and freeze once cool. I use plastic lid rings with silicone insert since the metal ones get rusty when used like this. I’ll prep like 40 of these in one session but that’s definitely using a bigger budget so I don’t have to do it as often.
My recommended rice is long grain brown with about 1/16 to 1/8 of the amount cooked being wild rice mixed in. They both take the same amount of time to cook when mixed, but it’s a decent amount longer than white rice. I usually put an arbitrary splash of sake or gin in the water for cooking the rice but it’s largely a habit from copying grandpa.
I take a frozen jar to work with me in a lunch bag and it doubles as an ice pack for whatever else I want in there. I aim for it to be thawed enough to shake it and mix it before microwaving. For at home I thaw it in the fridge the day before. When I didn’t have a microwave I just steamed the whole jar in the instant pot.
Jars and instant pot + accessories were all things I waited for sales on. It can be done without instant pot but it’s probably the safest way I can think of to cook things and fuck off without worrying about it burning the house down. Jars are merely the cheapest I could find in decent quantity and dishwasher safe.
This is probably the cheapest with highest output volume food option I batch prep. I also do things like potato leek and/or squash soup, or potato cheese and soy bacon soup (I’m not actually vegetarian or vegan but it’s a real pain cooking all the bacon needed and cutting meat is tiresome), and some other stuff that has been hit or miss that I only tried once. I keep them all in a chest freezer and I take out whatever I feel like eating as an easy microwave meal, unless I’m running low and need to reserve them for work lunches.
Interesting. What does the alcohol do for the rice?
1/8 of tall wide mouth mason jar each
Americans really will use anything but the metric system /s
Lol I’m actually Canadian and prefer metric, but these jars have weird and inconsistent volume so I just eyeball everything and the last one that has a different amount from the others is the one I eat on the spot.
Time to go back to making veggie “burgers” out of portabella mushrooms and beans lol
Ok but what is that flavour? Strawberry cheese coffee? Is that common?
You deserve worse. Keep asking the broke government for more free stuff, and then when they print more money, make a pikatchu face on the prices shooting up with even more inflation.
Enjoy! I’m enjoying watching you suffer.
So… they shouldn’t buy food?
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Look at mr moneybags with his “food”.
‘Too good to go’ gives me 3 shoppingbags of food for that money here in the Netherlands. Just need a freezer to keep bread, meat and veggies last for longer. We reduced the costs of food with at least 250€ per month by getting food that normally would be thrown out by retailers that is perfectly fine to consume.
That really isn’t bad
I’m in Vietnam having a peek about. Just ate a light, 4 course meal with beers for two for about usd $6… It was incredible.
The world is indeed out of balance.
I miss Vietnam a lot. Great food and people.
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- Fancy brioche buns, not normal burger buns. Brioche is typically the most expensive bread off the shelf.
- Fancy veggie burgers, of course they are expensive lol, that’s fancy vegan stuff
- Don’t pretend that is a Danish singular. That’s a huge fuckin Danish, that’s the equivalent of 4 Danishes easily lol
I hate when people buy fancy bespoke food and are like “why do my gluten free vegan free range burgers cost so much?”
If you want to be vegetarian/vegan, go buy normal vegis, don’t complain about your super fancy “takes a bunch of extra work and has very low demand” food being expensive.
You miss the point. Food should not even cost this much. Even crappier “normal” food costs too much yet is still unhealthy. And OP could have specific food needs, you don’t know. So why should he have to pay more for a basic need.
What is the objectively correct price for this food?
Rice and beans is food
Yeah, that’s not a danish, that’s an entire cake. It’s 14 ounces.
OP spent $19 to feed four people a veggie burger on a brioche bun, and a pretty good sized piece of cake in the shape of a Danish… Like half a square foot of the stuff.
While not cheap overall, each person is eating for less than $5. And they’re eating better than you could taking that $5 to any rte food store.
Not sure what the problem is here.
Yeah fuck me for wanting a gluten free burger, as if being gluten-free was my choice
You can eat gluten-free, vegan, etc without eating like a hipster. That was @pixxelkick’s whole point. Actual hamburger patties are gluten-free.
