Been eating cheap from before the COVID-9
pandemic. Here I will contribute two
recipes:
(1) Pizza.
This pizza is good on cost and preparation
time, okay to good on nutrition (I'm
thinking mostly of calories), and, IMHO,
flavor.
Can make a pizza for one for about 9 cents
of flour and the whole pizza for 40 cents.
For the dough for 8 such pizzas, I use 650
milliliters of water, 1 kilogram of flour,
1 tablespoon of active dry yeast, and 1
tablespoon of salt.
For one pizza, I form the dough into a
flat circle about 8" in diameter, pre-cook
in a microwave for 2 minutes, add tomato
sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and sliced
pepperoni, place on a cast iron frying
pan, add a cover, and cook at 1/3 power on
a common, large electric stove-top burner
for 14 minutes, slice, add 2 tablespoons
of grated Pecorino Romano cheese.
More details at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666008
and the responses there maybe from some
people who assumed I was claiming to do
better than their favorite pizzeria.
Also more details at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18851878
with a cost analysis indicating that one
pizza costs 39.203 cents.
(2) Pork BBQ
At Sam's Club I got two fresh pork "Boston
Butt" (shoulder) pieces.
One at a time, I put them on a wire
roasting rack in a big 'granite' covered
roasting pan, placed in an oven at 221 F.
About 10 hours later a fast reading meat
thermometer reported that the internal
meat temperature was 195 F (I was shooting
for only about 185 F), and I declared the
meat done.
Meat was soft and juicy. There was a lot
of liquid in the bottom of the roasting
pan.
I used a slotted kitchen spoon to scoop
the (soft) meat from the wire rack and
roasting pan into a clean plastic dishpan.
From there I moved batches one at a time
to a cutting board.
There was a small, thin, clean, dry
shoulder bone; discarded that.
On the cutting board, I included and mixed
in the fat still with the meat.
With a chef's knife with a 12" blade, made
parallel cuts about 1" apart and then at
90 degrees again. I grew up in Memphis
and there the BBQ sandwiches were from
picnic pork shoulder BBQ chopped
essentially as I did it here.
From the two pieces, scooped into a total
of 6 covered plastic containers, each with
2 quarts of volume. Put 5 of those in the
freezer and the 6th in the main part of
the refrigerator.
Data:
Raw Weights:
9.69 pounds
10.14 pounds
Costs:
$11.41
$11.97
Cooked weights:
2,466 grams
2,810 grams
Yields:
100 * ( 2,466 /
28.3495 ) / (
9.69 * 16 ) =
56.105%
100 * ( 2,810 /
28.3495 ) / (
10.14 * 16 ) =
61.095%
Total cost per pound
of cooked BBQ:
( 11.41 + 11.97 )
/ ( ( 2,466 +
2,810 ) / (
28.3495 * 16 ) )
= $2.010
Total cost per ounce
of cooked BBQ:
( 11.41 + 11.97 )
/ ( ( 2,466 +
2,810 ) / (
28.3495 ) ) =
$0.125,627
One sandwich can do well with 2 2/3 ounces
of the BBQ or costs
( 2 + 2/3 ) *
0.125,627 = $0.335
or 33.5 cents for the BBQ pork.
Add a bun, some BBQ sauce, some hot BBQ
sauce, and some homemade coleslaw
(shredded green cabbage and bottled Ranch
dressing), and have a good soft, moist,
chopped, BBQ pork sandwich.
So the effort put
( 2,466 + 2,810 ) / (
28.3495 * 16 ) =
11.632
pounds of cooked, ready to eat, soft,
moist, chopped pork BBQ.
Let's see: At 2 2/3 ounces per sandwich,
what I put in the refrigerator in the six
containers is good for
( ( 2,466 + 2,810 ) /
( 28.3495 ) ) / ( 2 +
2/3 ) = 69
sandwiches!