>Of course sticking to small quantities is never going to be a good value. That is really all you needed to say. Forcing yourself to re-use an ingredient with other recipes is actually not a good value. Suppose you bought a jar of some random fermented ox testicles for a recipe. You then go "oh, well I need to use up the rest of this, what other recipes from that culture exist". And it turns out you can use it up with this other recipe, but you need a bag of sun dried baby pigeons that only comes in 2 pound quantities, plus a jar of candied dodo brains.
Oh, but you can just substitute? Yes you *can* do that, you *can* do a lot of stuff. I cook for fun not to survive. I choose not to make an "authentic" recipe by swapping out splenda for the candied dodo brains and chicken breast for the baby pigeons.
>You don't need special equipment to sharpen the razor (regular sharpening equipment that you already have can do the job)
And here is where the lies begin. The average person does not have 8k+ stones lying around the house. The techniques for knife maintenance are inapplicable for SR honing. And you aren't going five years without hitting a stone with a razor. Except, oh yeah. You also expect me to believe your soap puck has lasted for five years. The reality is you used that razor about four times, you rolled the edge stropping it on your belt, you tried to restore it using your lansky kit, made the problem worse, and you've been using Harry's or Dollar Shave Club ever since while trying to get others to make the same mistakes you did.
The reality is $50 buys you an EJ head, and enough DE blades to last you the rest of your life. But of course you'll pretend a third path doesn't exist because it fits your agenda.
>If you can't see how Blue Apron's grocery prices aren't a terrible value, you need to learn how to shop. If you measure value by how many calories you got per penny, then obviously it's going to seem that way, and we will never agree.
Adam Edwards
You are literally autistic.
Benjamin Edwards
Seems stupid to me, like every other absolutely pointless subscription service that's plaguing the market.
Brody Bailey
>But of course you'll pretend a third path doesn't exist because it fits your agenda. What make you think that? I was actually going to bring up DEs, but decided not to because I thought talking about the cost effectiveness of razors too much in a cooking thread was autistic. DEs are definitely a better option for most people, I just talked about the example you chose, and I still stand by all the figures I quoted.
Again, my point is that you're thinking about shopping wrong, which you are. And you also keep presenting a ridiculously stupid argument. Remember that the vast majority of ingredients any recipe will need aren't uncommon or very expensive. Your hyperbolic arguing doesn't change that. There's a reason every other person in this thread thinks Blue Apron is a terrible value, and it's not because they're somehow blind to the virtue of having small quantities of overpriced groceries shipped to their house.
Here's an example using food prices: Blue Apron says they charge $10 per meal; you have to buy more than that, but lets go with the quantity they set for one meal. Yesterday I went grocery shopping and bought, among other things, ingredients for split pea soup. Just the stuff for the soup cost me about $10, and when I cook it today, I will be able to make enough food for five meals. And that was just part of what I bought, which still ended up less than a week's worth of Blue Apron. That's just one example, but it's not really atypical if you actually know how to shop and plan out meals. By any measure, services like Blue Apron are terrible values, and there's really no reasonable argument about why that's not the case. Even those companies basically acknowledge it, since their marketing is all based around convenience.
Jaxon Allen
>It's almost like women want to say, "well, I got the ingredients from "them" and I cooked according to their insructions, but the meal sucked so it was their fault >women Most of the people that use these cooking services, at least the ones I know, are men. These are good for people who don't know the first thing about cooking and need all the ingredients handed to them, with specific directions. It's basically a lot of overpriced hand-holding. Most women I know that are learning how to cook find their recipes on Insta and Pinterest, or sites like Tasty, and have less of a hard time placing the fault on themselves when they fuck it up than men do. But I guess it depends on who you know...both yours and my observations are anecdotal, after all.
As for OP's question, I think it's good if you're learning to cook. Maybe do one of those services, Sun Basket or Blue Apron for a month or two to learn about cooking before you begin to branch out on your own. I think it's a nice way to introduce cooking to people who otherwise wouldn't want to learn, due to a lack of confidence/fear of failure if they researched and still fucked it up, or are afraid of the "intimidating" cooking class. (Being intimidated is a bitch reason to avoid taking a class but to be fair, some cooking instructors are stuck-up dicktips so there is that.) Overall, I'm in favor of anything that gets my fellow generation of lazy millennial fucks to pick up a spatula and actually try to cook something, rather than brag on social media about ordering pizza twice in one week. I couldn't justify the expense for what you get but if you can afford it, want to learn to cook, and don't have the schedule to take a class at a local community college/agriculture center, it's a decent way to learn.
Caleb Peterson
>split pea soup Other than rice and beans that's about as frugal as you can get for one meal. The point of BA is that although some meals are obviously made from relatively common ingredients, many are not. In order to approximate the level of variety of ingredients I'd have to have a hoarder's kitchen, and throw out a lot of food. You keep going back to this argument that BA is supposed to be a substitute for welfare-tier eating, when it's obviously not.
>Remember that the vast majority of ingredients any recipe will need aren't uncommon or very expensive
I never said they were individually very expensive, but when you buy a pack with the intent of using 1/5 of it, you don't get to calculate the price as 1/5 what you paid. What you paid is what you paid. Just from this months' selections, here are some random ingredients that I don't intend to consume in mass quantities, but which require a small amount per recipe. This doesn't include the vegetables that you can't buy a few ounces at a time, but only in fairly large bunches.
golden mountain sauce tamarind conentrate "tempura mix" (presumably panko and some other ingredients that would have to be purchased separately) hoisin sauce white miso paste udon noodles dried limes israeli couscous verjus vadouvan curry powder matzo meal pickled beets castelvetrano olives sweet piquante pepper pistachios fregola sarda pasta
Obviously, a twenty pound bag of dried green peas and a couple of ham hocks and salt is going to be a cheaper way to not die of starvation. That isn't what this is competing with though.
>and I still stand by all the figures I quoted. >a puck of shaving soap that lasts 5 years
Yeah, no, it's just more creative accounting. You can lie to yourself but I've been soap shaving for years and you aren't fooling me at all.
Colton Baker
>You can lie to yourself It's Pre de Provence, if you want me to be specific. It's super hard, and bigger than most other pucks of shaving soap. I don't go overboard with loading my brush like most people do. I haven't used it exclusively (I have a couple of cheap shaving sticks I use for travel), but I've used it most of the time, and it's not completely gone. You don't have to believe me, but I'm not lying.
>You keep going back to this argument that BA is supposed to be a substitute for welfare-tier eating And you keep arguing that Blue Apron needs to be compared to the most expensive ways to buy food for yourself, which is also obviously not the case. If you like the convenience of it, that's fine, but don't act like it's a good value, because it isn't. And that's not what it's designed for, it's a convenience service.
Owen Gomez
I'm familiar with pre de provence. It doesn't last five years. Closer to a year. >but I don't use much >also I use other stuff >also uhh, I've been using Dollar Shave Club and gilette gel sometimes, actually most of the time, actually for the last four years since I rolled the edge on my $30 whipped dog razor because I didn't know what I was doing RIght >And you keep arguing that Blue Apron needs to be compared to the most expensive ways to buy food for yourself, which is also obviously not the case. It "needs" to be compared with the closest alternatives, which are: 1. Eating at restaurants every night, or 2. Buying distinct ingredients for each meal, in small quantities, instead of rotating between the exact same 5 ingredients for months at a time, or "creative accounting" like calculating the cost of the portion you used, and pretending the rest magically didn't need to be purchased
