Can't cook any dishes that need Balsamic vinegar because I can't afford the real stuff

Can't cook any dishes that need Balsamic vinegar because I can't afford the real stuff.

How has being poor affected your cooking/diet enjoyment?

>enriched macaroni product
>rice

You don't need Balsamic vinegar for anything. So what the Sicilians do and just put a little sugar with your red wine vinegar.

Is balsamic vinegar really that expensive? Here you can buy an above average-tier one for less than 5€/L
Obviously if you want fancy stuff you can get to 200€/L easily but for normal cooking you don't really need those

dumb frog poster

>mfw i don't want to spend $4 on greek yogurt so i get the shitty regular stuff

>reconstituted peanut shavings

Really? I'll be so happy if you're right. There are a lot of Italian dishes I've been dying to cook, but they always use balsamic. Why would they list an ingredient that's not necessary?

Because those cheap ones aren't even balsamic vinegar. They're red wine vinegar with sugar. Look into it and your mind will be blown like mine was.

The massive price different between them isn't for the fancy bottle or name.

>Can't cook any dishes that need Balsamic vinegar because I can't afford the real stuff.
$2.50

>the real stuff

You literally quoted me.

That's probably because you're the OP.

How can you not afford like $3 to buy real balsamic vinegar?

>They're red wine vinegar with sugar.
Some of them also use plain grape juice, so try using a bit of that too OP.

Since I can get a gallon of white vinegar for like $3 I mainly use that, and find that it can make almost any kind of stew or soup taste better if used in the right amount. I'm pretty happy with what I eat though, even though it's all mostly basic cheap foods it's healthy and still tasty, it just takes a bit more work and time to make it good.

I don't really eat chips and snacks that often anymore. They're actually pretty expensive and not filling.

>Why would they list an ingredient that's not necessary?
It's trendy, particularly in the US where it has two big things going for it: the cachet of being an expensive import and being sweet as fuck. If you're seeing recipes that call for you to make a Balsamic reduction you're looking at the kind of recipes chefs in middlebrow restaurants used to impress he punters a decade or two ago. No reason to bother with recipes like that. If you want to cook Italian food look for grandma farmhouse recipes. That's where the cuisine really shines.

The $3 stuff isn't real. It's shit.

>77777
Well OK then. Can't argue with those magnificent sevens.

>How has being poor affected your cooking/diet enjoyment?
The only time I've been disappointed is not being able to afford grass-fed beef. The lack of clean drinking water is way more disappointing to me. Tap water is disgusting. A lot of bottled water is just tap water filled with crap. And they don't sell distilled water to drink either.

>And they don't sell distilled water to drink either.

Where do you live? Even when I lived in flyover central every supermarket carried distilled water.

Though you'd be a retard to buy it. Get a filter and you'll save a ton of money compared to buying bottled over and over again.

UK. They don't sell it in supermarkets near the mineral/spring water. They sell it in a few places near the laundry supplies.

Last time I was fasting I tried drinking tap water, I picked the glass up and it literally smelled like poison. Absolutely revolting. I'm at the point where I'd consider buying some land and digging my own well to get fresh water instead of tap.

Also, water filters don't filter out fluoride, just parasites and debris.

>the rest of the world gets memed on olive oil and balsamic vinegar etc except australia

Olive tree outside my window grapes up the road, no mafia though

>can't afford to eat prime dry aged beef every week
>have to settle for regular prime grade

Quints speak truth.
Its a good thing he didnt claim his statement to be false or the internet would have exploded.

>Also, water filters don't filter out fluoride

Sure they do. There are multiple types, in fact. A filter that contains ion-exchange (aka "deionizer") media, or activated alumina, or reverse osmosis all remove flouride.

>dig your own well

I live in the country in the US and have a well, but I couldn't have dug it myself. I had to have a licensed well digger put it in and he had to register it with the feds. Wasn't that expensive, @ $1800. The water is better than any I've ever tasted other than mountain springwater in the Olympic range. Interestingly, if you live in an area with public water supplies, it's illegal to put in a well.

>it's illegal to put in a well.

And I would care about that....why?

East yuropean here.

>follow recipes's in english and not my language since there's a lot more (and generally better)
>have to google translate ingredient names to figure out my country's equivalent
or
>always keep google open in a different tab to convert quarts, pounds, stones to metric quantities since I dunno what the hell they mean


Worst of all is simply not finding ingredients that are listed because they're too specific (like panko) or confusing ingredients because of cultural differences (like I spent days searching for "whole milk" in stores only to realize that we have no "whole milk", our regular milk is "whole milk".)

>all remove flouride
I ready about it in the past. Apparently those ones fitted to tap water are really wasteful, like 300litres of water just to get 1 litre. I still read that they don't separate the fluoride molecules.

It's only reverse osmosis systems which waste water, and the typical bypass ratio is only about 1.5 to 1. So if you got a liter of water you only wasted a half-liter. Even so it's a fuck of a lot cheaper than bottled water, which has about a 4,000% markup.

Or you could use the other types of filters which have zero waste.

>>I still read that they don't separate the fluoride molecules.
And that's utter crap. If you're old enough to post here you studied chemistry in school, right?

>And that's utter crap. If you're old enough to post here you studied chemistry in school, right?
Yes, I studied chemistry a long time ago. Unfortunately our classes didn't cover water filters.

If you actually want to be helpful could you post a link to a 100% verified water system that actually removes the minerals from the water and that I can buy in the UK which isn't absurdly expensive?

Surely you can google either "reverse osmosis filter", "deionizing water filter" or "activated alumina water filter".

I could name several well known brands but I'm based in the US so I doubt you'd find them in the UK. But I would think they would be readily available in the UK too, just from different suppliers.

Fines? Waste of money when they rip it out and charge you for the labor to do so? Jail time when you scream and fight about muh sovereign citizen rights and get charged with assault, possession of unregistered and illegal firearms, and a search of your computer reveals 2 gig worth of CP?

Why would I get fined? The chance of anyone even finding out about it would be about as likely as winning the lottery.

And if they did I'll simply blame it on the previous tenant.