To be absolutely fair: A chicken breast is not a breaded chicken patty and isn't really a good substitute to a fast food sandwich. Part of the appeal of fast food is the lack of thought that goes into prep. Basic warm and serve items from the grocery store - prepared patties and prepared fries(chips!) - is the comparable solution.

You'd have to likely cut, tenderize, and bread the breasts before shallow frying in a pan and heat up some oil to fry the fries/chips in. The patties and prepared chips can just go in the oven while you wait.

I literally just chucked 1kg in a dish with some oil on top and turned the oven on for a bit. I now have multiple servings.

Do what you want, but be honest about it.

I am being honest about it. Go ahead and tell folks to just make something else with chicken. But it isn't the same thing as a breaded chicken sandwich. Which you'd also get multiple servings of.

Nobody is trying to tell you that you can't have a completely different meal for less than the cost of a McDonald's chicken sandwich.

price per KG (less any sale) is about double that what you paid.

and buying at small quantities can be even double that.

if you were comparing price of mcdonalds chicken burger to a plainish chicken breast, the 2 arent the same at all, which the previous poster was commenting on.

to turn that raw chicken breast to something close to McDs chicken burger requires quite a bit of time and additional ingredients.

on the fries, i agree. you can buy a KG of shoestring fries for 2-3$, with some salt are the same as mcd fries for the most part

if doing a raw ingredient comparison, buying at scale of 1KG is definitely cheaper.

The price of oil to deep fry is not cheap. Deep frying consumes a lot of oil and if you don't do it often, it is not cost effective.

And to have them taste as good as McD's, you'll at the least have to blanch and fry them twice with a freeze in between. If you cut your own fries, you should be doing this because it is awesome.

https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/mcdonalds-reveals-beloved-f...

Also if you don’t go through at least some of the hassle the fries will kinda suck. I mean it won’t be bad, it’s still potato salt and oil, but “fresh cut fries” will be limp and soggy unless you do the prep work.

Why would you even want to make it into a lesser foodstuff?

It would be cheaper, not more expensive, to pad it out so that you end up with like 50g of chicken and 50g of bread or whatever.

its not a lesser food (well maybe specifically mcdonalds), its different food.

are you arguing there is no point to transformative cooking to make something diff as it would be lesser than it originally was?

thats like saying why bother trying to make an apple pie, when you can just eat apples.

also your proportions are whack, have you had a breaded chicken burger? for the most part its externally coating the chicken breast patty with a breading/seasoning mixture and frying it.

you arent padding the meat mixture like say a meatloaf.

No, I'm saying that the stuff you add makes it cheaper per gram.

A McD's burger has hardly any actual chicken. You need to compare like for like. The cheap ones are even made from mechanically recovered meat.

An apple pie is cheaper than apples.

What are we even talking about? This is just funny.

At my local store in CA (cheapest non-bulk prices, Costco is cheaper but more awkward perhaps, also shopping there takes 3x longer) it’s $6 for 1 lb of chicken breast and $3 for 1 pound of fries. So that’s around double your prices.

From what I understand, British supermarkets are insanely cheap when it comes to food. You can't usually get even remotely similar prices in the US.

That hasn’t been my experience. Something were cheaper (converting GBP to USD) but it was usually only ~10%. Other things were more expensive.

Which store?

I was just window shopping in a few towns in the UK. Local stores and places like Sainsbury. Comparing staple items to Safeway and other US stores.

Prices may have change recently.

Sainsbury's is up to 2x the price for basic items (compared to Aldi, Lidl and Asda). Atomic Shrimp has interesting budget survival videos with 3 meals per day mostly from shopping value chain supermarkets, as well as direct comparisons between them.

Similar to Safeway in the US prices are much higher than budget grocery stores.

So, how much is the thread-starting 1kg of actual chicken breast for example?