Is eating out really more expensive?

Cafe Society
1

First of all I concede if you’re feeding a family then the answer is YES!

But let’s move beyond that, what about the single individual that doesn’t eat much but does enjoy a very varied diet. I realized when I was single I could eat cheaper by eating out as much as possible(I’m not talking about dine in pricey places).

Often times if I wanted to cook something at home, especially something with “exotic” ingredients that couldn’t be used for much else it required an upfront investment buying even the smallest amounts. Which then would often spoil because I would lose interest for a month or two before wanting it again on a whim.

I think the worst I’ve ever seen was Thai food, by the time you’ve sourced galangal leaves etc You’d be better off just paying five bucks once a month for whatever you crave.

2

The answer is YES. No questions asked.

Sure, there are some types of foods which will cost you more to make, but A) Where the hell can you get decent Thai for $5? and B) You don’t -need- to eat any specific cuisine and you can still get a massive variety of food without going into crazy expensive stuff. You can make tons of korean cuisine for very cheap, for example.

3

For Thai, just use a good paste like Mae Ploy. You’ll get many servings from a container of Mae Ploy. If you’re eating at places that are only charging $5 for a serving, chances are that’s what they’re using too. Typically, Thai food runs more like $8-$10 for a single order in my experience. I can do much better than that myself per serving, either with pastes or doing it from scratch (typically, I do a combination of the two, using some paste and some fresh ingredients to give it a fresh flavor.) Then again, I do live only a few miles from a Thai grocery, so it’s not hard to source ingredients like galangal root and kaffir lime leaves and they are pretty cheap.

Now, for something like the dollar menus at fast food joints, I find it hard to compete with that. I might be able to beat their prices, but it’d be really close and it’s not worth the effort. In that case, I’d say it’s cheaper to eat out.

4

Well sure if you just want human chow, of course at home is cheaper. I can get a hundred grams of protein via TVP for under a US buck, yum!

I realized that for a single individual the labor expended on cooking dishes is often not worth it unless you do a large amount, which you can freeze and reheat but then the texture can be off and blah.

I did an experiment once where I exclusively ate out whatever my whim took me to, and where I bought groceries. The eat out month came in CHEAPER.

I was single mind.

5

Except I find that restaurant portions are often so generous that I can get two servings from a single order.

6

I agree with you on the dollar menu thing, with the exception that I think the baked potato at Wendys for a buck is a ripoff. But the dollar chilli?! Screw cooking that at home for a cupful!

7

I think it’s cheaper - something like a whole chicken and a bag of rice and a bag of carrots is inexpensive, and when combined with some supporting ingredients can form the basis of a number of nutritious meals - roast chicken, chicken soup, a Thai stir fry/curry, etc. - cooking at home does take a good bit of time and effort, though, and I think it can be harder to find the motivation when cooking for one.

8

In local groceries a ready to eat whole rotisserie chicken is .50 USD higher in price then a whole raw chicken. I feel stupid when my wife buys raw chicken, the effort time and gas costs money too!

9

Sure. But for stuff like chili, the freezer and some zip lock bags or Tupperware-style containers are your friend.

10

I roast a lot of chickens at home (well, about one a month, don’t know if that’s a lot). A home-roasted chicken is way, WAY tastier than a rotisserie chicken, IMO.

11

I would usually say yes, until my wife had me buy ingredients for a soup that cost over $40 just for the meat ingredients.

In theory, it would be cheaper to make at home because of the volume of servings. However, leftovers are not efficiently used in my household. They could be, if I ate them all and was OK gaining 30-40 lbs per year. Still, even with our waste (with the caveat this is a family) we come out ahead. I get how this would be even more difficult as an individual, but some things (like chili) I could see freezing and using up.

12

This is kind of the way it’s always rolled for me. When I was single, it was cheaper per serving to make food myself. Problem was, that most recipes make quite a bit of food, and I’m not great about eating leftovers days on end until they’re gone.

So it turned out that while it was cheaper per serving, it often ended up more expensive because I ended up eating something else and trashing 1/3 to 1/4 of the dish because I was sick of eating it.

With a wife and two boys, it’s definitely cheaper to cook for ourselves, even if we shell out for the good stuff. Case in point- pizzas are pretty cheap for us- flour’s dirt cheap, at $8 per 25 lb bag, yeast is almost free, and a can of tomato puree, some dry oregano, cloves of garlic, onion and butter are usually things we have on hand, and that are super-cheap to begin with. The only expensive-ish items are cheese and the toppings, and we can spend a LOT on toppings and cheese before we even come close to the cost of a delivery pizza.

13

Yeah, if you’re not efficient with leftovers or freezing, it’s easy to come out way behind. But when I was single, I could easily sustain myself comfortably on about $5-$7 a day without having to resort to meager beans and rice type meals. Compared with eating out, that’s a ton cheaper, unless, like I said before, I’m just eating from the dollar menu.

14

It depends. How much do you eat? How good are you with eating or freezing leftovers? Is your schedule regular enough to plan well?

When I was single and in grad school, cooking made no sense for me. My schedule was irregular so I could not plan well (leading to spoiled food, uneaten leftovers, etc.) this also made it hard to pack lunches. I rarely are that much at a time, and I was bad at leftovers. And my kitchen was pretty bad for cooking in.

I could easily live off a single $5.00 foot long from Subway and a cup of yogurt a day. A $20.00 pizza order could feed me for three days.

With some thought, I may have been able to meet that at the supermarket. But in practice, it never worked like that- and to add insult to injury, half the time food would spoil before I got to it and I’d have to eat out anyway.

15

Because… the joy of cooking.

Many folks over in the hobby thread listed cooking as one of their favorite hobbies. Also… eating out takes too much effort.

16

It’s about investment and logistics. Once the initial investments are made, with proper logistics meals can be made easy-peasy for minimal cost and effort.

The first thing one needs, is spices, pastes/sauces, and baking needs. Even if you’re not baking, having things like flour, baking powder/soda, salt(s), etc. Are vital to being able to make a varied and delicious menu. Staples like rice and potatoes are vital as well, rice is about $10 for a 10 KG bag of plain white or brown rice, potatoes hover around $2-3 for a 5 LB bag. Cooking oil, olive oil, margarine, things like that, buy them when on sale, get the biggest one available, in the end it translates to cents-per-use. Olive oil can be had for $5 per litre, canola oil is cheap as dirt when bought in large quantities, I buy the 16L jugs myself. $17.

It’s easy enough to buy one or two items every shopping trip, things like garlic/onion powder go for $3-ish for a large "bottle."Small bags of spices are a buck or two. Once one acquires about 10 different spices, it’s easy enough to make a wide assortment of “styles” of food. Toss in sauces, Worcestershire, Sri Racha, Hoisin, and a decent barbecue sauce, and you’re good to go.

Logistics is the fun part. Look for pound-for-pound deals. Get an eye of round, they’re a decent and cheap, tough cut of meat that can stand up to pretty much anything, and doesn’t require much careful husbandry to prepare. Here (Canada) a small eye of round will cost you about $15 for approximately 1.5 KG when not on sale. Cut it into 4-6 servings, that’s approximately $3 per sitting for decent Grade A beef.

Freeze the portions, and when you leave for work/school/whatever you can put it in the oven on a plate to thaw. If you are particular about “food saftey” you could always leave it in the the fridge the night before. When you get home, dice it into cubes and let it sit in a pyrex with 3 parts ketchup to one part Sri Racha for an hour or two. Cover with tinfoil, and cook at 300 for an hour and you will have some mouth-watering, soft beefaly goodness to serve over 35 cents of rice.

Sweet peppers are around $2 for four, Take one sweet pepper, cut’n’gut, coat with olive oil, and sprinkle with $1.99 “all purpose seasoning.” Place alongside your beef, BOOM! Rice, peppers, beef, all for about $5 or so, and perhaps 20-30 minutes prep/cleanup time.

Chicken quarters are another good deal, you can get leg quarters for around $1 each. Keep a freezer bag with bread crumbs, ($5 for 10LBS.) Salt, pepper, paprika, mustard and “all purpose” in the freezer, thaw a quarter for the day, come home, shake and bake. Tinfoil up a single potato, throw that in the oven, too. Get a Celery bunch for 99 Cents, cut up a few stalks, and dip in ranch salad dressing which can be had for about $2 per bottle on sale. Once the potato is done, cut in half, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and some “all purpose” herb mix, BOOYAH, healthy good dinner for in and around $3. less than ten minutes prep and wash time.

(distracted by an important phone call, will conclude later… hope that helps! 8) )

17

This is so wrong. As noted above, you just have to know what you’re doing regarding the ingredients, and saving portions for later. (Yes, it helps if you have a good market close by for the right ingredients.) And–as also noted above–any place charging $5 is probably going to give you mediocre Thai food at best. In fact, since Thai food became generally popular, a lot of even the higher priced places are serving less than stellar food. With years of practice I can make better kuai- tiew sen yai than most of the cheap places around here (Thaitown) will do, because they don’t expect most people to care.

We’ve had this thread before, I’m pretty sure, and drove it into the ground.

18

Especially if you don’t live close to many options, and if you’re going to sit down in a restaurant. When you eat in a restaurant, you’re not only paying taxes and tip on top of the price, but you’re paying excessively marked-up prices for beverages.

19

For Christmas dinner I bought a prime-grade rib roast for just under $97. A can of snails cost $9. Trader Joe’s French Onion Soup is… what? $4? We didn’t have potatoes this year (too much food), but how much is a couple of potatoes? Brussels sprouts are cheap, too. Sherry and garlic, we already had. I got the rosemary from the front yard. Cream was a buck and a half. A very nice Washington (local) wine and a bottle of bubbly totalled $20. Trader Joe’s cheesecake, $7. So what’s that? About $140? We’d pay about that – maybe a bit less – at a restaurant.

But we had two large slices of prime rib for Christmas dinner. We had two slices of cheesecake then, and two more tonight. And we still have eight nice slices of beef and half a cheesecake left that we can enjoy ‘free’ after the initial investment.

20

People who eat out instead of cooking aren’t sitting around thinking “wish someone on the Internet would give me a swell lecture about how cooking at home is easy, cheap and fun if you just follow these 500 steps!”

We’re thinking “I’m tired and hungry and have ten things to do tonight. I think I’ll eat out.”

I’ve given up on buying meat for home. I hate cooking it and it turns out shitty. When I buy fresh veg they go bad before I can use them. I don’t have a dishwasher so cooking means 10x more time invested in cooking and cleaning than eating. With leftovers I don’t care to eat.

I could pop out to any number of restaurants and get veggies and meat cooked nicely with no cleanup and no leftovers. I don’t see how this is a losing proposition at all.