Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Butter, life is too damn short to cook with and eat shitty butter.
Also anything that goes between me and the ground, my bed, my shoes, and my tires.
I can say from personal experience this applies to vegan butter too. Get Miyoko's, or Violife if you absolutely have to, but for all that's good don't get shitty butter.
What grocery items are always worth the extra
butter ... my bed, my shoes, and my tires
Hello, fellow Costco shopper.
Kerrygold
Canadian maple syrup.
While I agree, the price difference between "maple syrup" (maple flavoured corn syrup) and maple syrup is way more than $5. A bottle of genuine maple syrup is $20+.
Even as a Canadian, I honestly prefer the cheap butter flavored syrup. I grew up on that stuff and I fucking love it so much. Real maple syrup is still delicious but I'll always choose some good old butter flavored syrup.
It's not called maple syrup if it's not real maple syrup. They'll call it maple flavored syrup, pancake syrup, but never maple syrup.
I'm going to sound like a hater, but the food in season and local is what you should be eating, and that will always be the cheapest. If you're talking processed food brands and shit in boxes in the middle of the store, I'd argue none of it is worth the extra money, its all bad for you, stop. That said, the frozen arby's curley fries are bomb, and no one does cheesey things like cheetos or smartfood.
Have you had the smartfood popcorn with Cheeto flavoring?
My god...never heard of this... https://www.smartfood.com/products/smartfood-cheetos-cheddar-flavored-popcorn
I've seen a few people saying that it's cheaper to buy stuff that's in season over the years but I've never seen prices drop on in season stuff before. Idk if it's just a thing where I am but the supermarkets seem to just pocket the difference and leave the prices the same year round.
This is less applicable to supermarkets a d more applicable to local green grocers.
Farmer’s market tomatoes. I went through my whole life thinking I hated tomatoes. Turns out, I hate grainy tomatoes that taste like nothing, and real tomatoes grown nearby and picked ripe are wonderful.
Absolutely. I was the same way then my mom make a margherita pizza mostly from scratch with tomatoes she grew herself and it was life changing
Yeah, this, but all the things, especially veggies.
The same plant can basically feel like an entirely different species.
Most of the time it just grew up properly (not maximising growth rate to lower the costs).
Coffee. It's something that I refuse to compromise on. It may be especially important to me because I like to drink it black. If it doesn't taste great without adding anything to it, it's not with drinking at all in my opinion.
Olive oil, although it's not really 1-5 extra where I am. There's a lot of advice to buy cheap oil for cooking, but that's not really true. The truth is that a lot of 'extra virgin' oil is sold in an old, rancid state, and you have to upgrade into the mid tiers to get away from that.
Buy the best olive oil you're willing to spend money on, even for cooking.
Yes, very much this (and the big price differences, and how cheap oils are also sold as expressive ones). Smol producers of extra virgin (= cold pressed with low yields) olive oils usually offer good price/performance, at least until they become a brand & sell out.
Other oils also have a ton of specifics ("oil" is a very broad term), like how fast flax oil degrades in quality & the 'use by' date are useless.
(Tho it's still important to understand how heat affects divergent & differently prepared oils - and especially for what you absolutely do need refined oil, regardless of plant.)
Eggs. I bought the expensive ones once just for laughs and they taste great without the weird funk. Now I have my own chickens, and the eggs are better than anything in the store. It’s probably more expensive though!
Carrots and celery I always buy organic because they seem to take on the flavor of whatever they were watered with. It makes a difference there for me.
And tortillas, I get the local boutique ones instead of the national mass market ones. Big difference there.
The difference in eggs is a placebo at best.
I can tuck homemade tortillas though, definitely worth it.
That probably depends on how you're cooking them. Runny yolk from good eggs is an order of magnitude better than the cheap eggs.
No. The only difference is freshness and how it retains its shape. It's entirely a placebo if you can taste a difference.
Kenji did an experiment https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs and I've done similar with my friends that all loathed actually taking care of chickens.
Pasta. It takes pasta dishes from "eh, it's food" to "this is really good".
Ever since I tried bronze pasta I cannot look at regular pasta the same way. I cannot buy that yellow stuff anymore.
Whole Foods, oddly enough, is the place I find the cheapest good pasta. Their store brand is less than most places and really good.
it is, even thier pasta sauce cheap, and at least your getting organic as well. thier more bougie ones are usually what people buy, Raos. i also have discounts for wf. i buy the egg wraps they sell now, but there are other places that sells it for somewhat cheaper, but its out of the way and inconvient to get to those other stores.
Mozzarella (talking about the balls of fresh mozzarella you get sealed in with their brine).
Can't do store brand anymore after having tried Galbani.
Canned tomatoes. Get the good ones if you can!
My husband and I got curious about the variance in canned tomatoes one day, so we got one can from every brand we could find. We had a blind tasting session where we tried each one without knowing what brand it was (palate cleansers in between) and ranked them all out of 10 with some comments. We didn't share our rankings or thoughts with each other until the Big Reveal at the end when we found out which tomatoes were which.
Turned out we actually preferred some of the cheaper brands, and the most expensive ones got worse ratings. There wasn't a direct relationship between price and preference, but it was interesting.
It was a fun day. We also did the same thing with soda water.
Believe it or not, top-shelf bacon. It's got more bacon in it. Less water. You're not paying nearly as much more per ounce of actual meat as it looks at first.
Lots of "organic" produce has a significantly longer shelf life than the basic stuff too. Never mind whether it's any healthier or tastier, I'm not saving any money if I pay a dollar less and it starts molding before I can eat half of it.