Almost every issue you’re describing can be addressed with proper mise en place. Unfortunately, it’s a skill that requires practice and can be improved by training. Teaching mise en place as a core skill in schools could help everyone with anything from cooking to home repair, but we apparently don’t want people to know diy skills…

Anyway, here’s a few tips:

• For burgers: Find some frozen patties that you like. I really like Birchwood Beef Burgers (not beef patties, different products). I go with frozen so that I didn’t feel pressured to eat more beef in a week than I want to, just because I bought it.
• Also for burgers, but great for home cooking: Buy frozen, diced onions. An entire bag usually costs less than two onions. When you’re about to flip your frozen burger patties, lay a small bed of frozen onions, sprinkle on salt and pepper, and flip the burger directly on them. This trick also works great with Morningstar veggie burgers.
• Fried chicken marinating: Use a bag and insert a straw to create a small opening before you close the bag. Then, slowly submerge the bag in water while you seal it. Once your marinade starts going above the top of your seal, pull the straw out and seal your bag. This will substantially save on the volume necessary to marinate the chicken.
• Fried chicken dredge 1: Add a little corn starch to your eggs. You can put the corn starch directly on your raw chicken, but that tends to lead to waste. The corn starch helps the eggs and batter stick. Don’t worry about lumps. Chopsticks are great for mixing.
• Fried chicken dredge 2: Use the chopsticks or a fork to dribble your dredge into your breading, then give it a slight mix. This will give your chicken a crispy texture.
• Fried chicken breading 1: Mix your spices first. Keep it relatively simple. My favorite mix is plenty of salt, a little msg, lots of garlic powder, little onion powder, white chili powder, black and white pepper, freeze dried chives. Add your flour to your spice blend, and taste it. Add flour until the spices give you just the right kick. The floury flavor will go away when it cooks, but it’ll still dilute the spices, so the flavor profile shouldn’t change much while the chicken cooks.
• Fried chicken breading 2: Use a container that is deeper than you think you’d need; it’s easier to conserve breading when you stack the chicken instead of spreading them out. Place all or as much of the chicken into the breading, coating and covering one piece at a time. Let them sit in there for a while before you start frying them. Fry in batches, you’ll have to re-coat the chicken in the breading before frying the later batches. These will be extra crispy.
• Fried chicken breading 2: Don’t make too much. Make more if you need more and then dump it on top of the chicken laying in the breading, but you’ll need far less than cooking videos will make you believe.
• Fried chicken frying 1: Use a high temp oil, and don’t let it get too hot. You can use a thermometer if you want, but sprinkling in some of your breading will let you know if you’re at the right temperature. Instant bubbles that swell then subside, and then slowly turning brown is exactly what you want. If it bubbles slowly start and you don’t notice a color change after 10-30 seconds, your oil isn’t hot enough. If it bubbles rapidly and changes colors immediately, your oil is too hot. Give your oil a few minutes to reach temp, 3-10 should be good.
• Fried chicken frying 2: I favor wider pans over deeper pans. You want the pan about 1 or 2 inches taller than the halfway point of your thickest piece of chicken. That extra 1-2 inches is to prevent your oil from spilling over. Even if your oil level doesn’t quite reach halfway up your thickest piece of chicken, the oil will bubble and climb its way up your fried chicken. So, you’ll likely be fine if you’re under by as much as a quarter of an inch. I’ve used cake or pie pans and tongs on a hot plate to fry chicken, and it comes out great. My preferred pan is a deep saute pan.
• Fried chicken frying 3: Keep a plate or something with a wire rack over it to drain your chicken after they’re done. Sprinkle salt over the pieces immediately once the next round of chicken comes out of the fryer, you can move the chicken from the rack to a plate. Add soon as the last batch of chicken goes into the fryer, dump what little breading you have left into the trash, and then at least rinse the container. When you’re done, allow the oil to cool completely, and then filter it through some coffee filters. If you kept the oil at a good temperature, you should get one or two more uses after it.

If you follow the fried chicken tips correctly, you should have used:

• 1 ziplock bag
• 1 straw
• 1 pair of chopsticks
• 1 bowl
• 1 container
• 1 oil frying thing
• 1 funnel
• A few coffee filters
• 2 plates
• 1 wire rack

If you clean as you go, your kitchen should be clean (except for the still-hot oil in the pan or fryer or whatever) before you bring the chicken to the table. That’ll give it enough time to rest and be juicy as fuck instead of drying out the instant you bite into a steam bomb.

More than one hour of hourly wage for a single meal. Or more than one hour of work for multiple homemade meals? I’m going with more than one hour of work for multiple meals. But you do you

I couldn’t have said it better myself, unless I was a 1997 Church’s Chicken commercial.

https://youtu.be/JR9SWZb0eEw

Because they add extra stabilizers and preservatives. Try it at home and the patties will taste the same.

Thank you for this. Neeeeed more useful stuuufffffff

Oof

More than I would pay for one

Let’s see… quarter pound patties are a little on the big end so assume 3oz patties, that’s 3.75 lbs of beef which is also about what 80/20 costs per pound on sale here. So a little over 14$ for the beef, buns are a buck fifty or so for an eight pack, you need three to make twenty burgers so that’s about 4.50$ more. Now you gotta put lettuce tomato pickle and onion on your twenty burgers that’s about a quarter head of lettuce, so a buck there, two or three cheap slicer tomatoes there’s two dollars, honestly fifty cents worth of pickles if you put four on each one and probably one onion is overkill so let’s round up to a whole dollar there.

Tbh excluding the condiments a dollar twenty five or so for a burger made at home is about right. If you wanted to go overboard the probably 1/8 jar of mayo and 1/4 squirt bottle of mustard is a buck or two. Now you’re a few bucks over but it’s an all the way burger not some knuckleheads “whatever I had in the fridge” concoction.

I used the sale price of ground beef because it’s the most expensive thing and if you’re cooking at home the most expensive component of a meal being on sale is what prompts you to make it.

Ok but by the time instacart delivers my groceries to me I could have just gone out for the same cost

Did you know…

1. You can go to the grocery store yourself, pick things out yourself, and take them home yourself? It’s cheaper, too!

2. You can buy more than 1 meal’s worth of food at a time and then store food at home for later – you actually don’t have to make a special order for every single meal!

No, I like them. Especially classic Red Hook street style. But I know what they are not and I know that I will only find disappointment in someone putting something on my plate at that price and try tell me it’s a burger.

I mean, that’s not what a smash burger is at all. They are actually tasty.

You’re right. They deserve to pay 50% more per ounce of beef for defying me.