Why would anyone buy Chinese food at a grocery store

I've got a local grocery store that you can grab chinese food from, and its one of the better chinese food places

t. flyover hell

IKR?
Unless you are a very good chef and have all the tools to easily recreate chinese food, you'd be better off just ordering takeout. I see everyone sharing these post on facebook:
>Create your own bigmac sauce at home!
Or just spend 50 cents at McDonalds at ask them for a cup of it.
>At home Wnedy's Frosty!
Literally get it for free at some Wendy's
>Homemade orange chicken!
Yeah, like $20 in ingredients alone when you can just spend $10 at your favorite takeout to feed two people.
OP's pic sounds like a good deal though if that brand doesn't taste like shit

Those dumplings look horrible.

>Or just spend 50 cents at McDonalds at ask them for a cup of it.
What if I'm too autistic to order something out of the ordinary? I guess I could ask a friend to do it for me.

the funny part about this is most safeway kitchens are ran by chinese or SEA people

something something Sysco

You mean the box you fucking retard.

WTF are you talking about. What special tools do you need to mimic takeout. I could understand if you said that about making authentic Chinese food but takeout is easy as fuck. All you need is soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and sesame oil and you've got 90% of takeout covered. Add a few fermented bean pastes and you can even tackle some real recipes. As for produce you should already be buying ginger and garlic and basic veg. Just add scallions and maybe bok Choi and you're golden.

LOL. You know, I thought the same way too for the longest until I saw epic meal time do it and no one treated them weird about it. Plus they had already ordered 100 mcDoubles too. I asked for it and even offered to pay for considering it might confuse the hell out of those no english mexican workers. But nope, I guess there is a button for "1 medium cup BigMac Sauce" since it was on my receipt.

You're going to have a hard time getting the wok up to the right heat with a typical home stove.

So stick it on your BBQ grill or use a propane burner aka "turkey fryer" outdoors.

Ha ha, that's what my bro does. I'm lucky enough to have a gas stove with a 12.5k BTU burner, so I can just about limp by.

I don't us a wok for that reason. It's shape and thinness means that it's basically meant to be strapped to the back of a jet to be effective. Use a large CI skillet, put your heat on high and leave it for 5-7 minutes. It gets ridiculously hot. I'm sure you can get it glowing eventually. Sure you lose out on a nice curvature and lightness that helps you toss food around with impunity but you do alright with a little practice.

Out of all the takeout in the world, Chinese is the one that's the least worth paying for. Save up those $15 bills and go to a proper chinese restaurant once a month.

hes not talking wok
hes talking the 50 different random ingredients that cost more than ordering from a chinese place

My wok is CI (an old Lodge from a couple decades ago), so I get the benefit of the curve, but pretty much do what you do.

>50 different random ingredients
They're all cheap ingredients, and if you use them for a week's worth of meals you get a week of cheap meals.

I thought about getting it once but it's a large piece of hardware for my small kitchen.

What are these random ingredients. Look at the top 10 take out dish recipes and identify even 10 unique ingredients that would be impractical to procure.

The old ones were a little smaller than the new ones. Still, the thing weighs like 10lbs. It's worth it for me because I do a lot of wok cooking. I can go through a liter of peanut oil in a month and a half.

>I can go through a liter of peanut oil in a month and a half.
Is this a cry for help?

The only two chinese places I know of are about 45mins to an hour away and are take-out only so the food is cold by the time I get home with it. If I buy it from stores and make it at home at least it's hot. I still like to get the take-out though because I can get things from there that I can't find in stores

>I don't know how to properly reheat food

I don't see what's worse about this than stopping to get Panda Express. If my dad came home with this for me and him when I was a kid, I would have been perfectly happy. It might not be enough for dinner for two adults, but that depends on the size of the entrees.

Also glad to see the "reeee you must cook all of your meals at home to save $3 a week" crowd is still around.

Criminally underrated post

Hyvee?

Some Chinese groceries have food selling, one called oceans was pretty decent.

So, I used to work in a Safeway deli and we had this. Serving this particular meal was complete bullshit, especially working during the summer. All the spoons in the case were left in there to get flesh-searing hot. You would be sweating, reaching in to fill up awkward boxes that don't want to stay open, making sure not to spill shit everywhere. One time someone ordered three of these meals and then walked out the front without paying.

The food isn't too bad, but not as good as Panda by a long stretch. We had this cute black girl working when I started, then some mexican lady took over. There was an actual asian girl (another cutie with braces) who worked the woks, but then they put here back in the bakery cause management at my store were mentally handicapped. Sometimes the chow mein tasted like farts, and a lot of the pork stuff had big chunks of gristle.

Since I left, a different company took over the chinese food counter and overhauled the menu. It's more expensive, but definitely better quality. There one or two people there now who work only to serve the chinese food, while the regular deli workers run around nonstop trying to help the cold case, hot case, salad case, and sandwich bar. I see them constantly just sitting around on their phones, occasionally slinging samples.

Anyways, ama.

Grocery store Chinese food is just frozen Chinese food heated up in an oven/steamer/microwave. Real Chinese food is more expensive but at the very least I'd say 60% of it wasn't frozen at some point

For a board about cooking, there sure are a ton of faggots on here that constantly advocate avoiding it.

I used to work at a safeway starbucks user. It always felt like delifags were jealous of the job. Is this true? If so trust me there was nothing to be jealous of serving crack moms and pregnant women gallons of sugary caffeine

Ok, jackass, let me put it another way. If I buy it at the store I can stock up on it rather than have to drive 45mins to get it again if I want it more than once or twice a month. If you're argument now is going to be that I could freeze it, it makes more sense to just buy it already frozen from the store at a cheaper price.

>The food isn't too bad, but not as good as Panda by a long stretch.
How can the food be not too bad if it wasn't even as good as shit? I've yet to find a single random chinese food place that didn't have better and cheaper food that panda express.

>stocking up on take out

Cooking's fine, but when you are trying to reproduce something like a fast food item and it takes twice the price and ten times the effort with roughly the same end result either way, it seems kinda pointless.

>it takes twice the price

You keep saying this, but Chinese take-out is cheap as fuck, ingredients-wise. I can make myself a huge batch of stir-fried noodles, protein, and veggies for under $3-4 a serving and have it for dinner several nights in a row. I guarantee it will taste better than some panda house/safeway garbage and cost less.

>food bought at a grocery store is take out just because you can buy the same thing from somewhere as take out
What?

I know one girl wanted Starbucks but got shoved into the Deli with us. Both areas in my store got equally swamped, just at different times of the day. We were right across from a big High School, as well as several churches and around the higher income area of the town. Kids getting lunch during the week was hell. Soccer moms buying 10+ sandwiches. I remember a volley ball tournament where I stood in the same place for 2 hours while shifts of people coming out of their games ordered sandwich after sandwich.

I live in NorCal. It's very white here. There's no good Chinese food here.

We were chronically busy and understaffed at the same time. Management was always trying to save money by cutting hours.

with club card...wtf safeways still have those?

the one i go to in winnipeg got rid of them 1-2 years ago

Do Americans really do this?

If you eat the shit from your local Chinese food place you can eat it anywhere. They all using the same pre-made shit and charging you double for it.
t. fag who worked in a "Chinese" restaurant

Nope.