Restaurants are expensive, and what’s more, you don’t always get value for your money. Have you ever felt that a restaurant meal lacked the quality you expected, considering what you paid for it? Have you ever felt you could have done better making it yourself? We looked into what people say are dishes that are better when homemade vs. at a restaurant.
Mango Sticky Rice
This popular Thai dish is easy to make on your own, and since restaurants often prepare huge amounts of rice in advance, restaurant rice can get mushy unless it’s freshly cooked. It’s also way cheaper; the same size portion you get in a restaurant will cost you about a tenth of the price to make on your own.
Gumbo
Unless you’re in Louisiana, the gumbo you get in a restaurant isn’t likely to be any better than what you can make at home, and it’ll cost a lot more. Ingredients for homemade gumbo are inexpensive, and you can make it exactly how you like it.
Jambalaya
What we said about gumbo also goes for jambalaya. It’s cheap and easy to make; you can add whatever spices and ingredients you want, and it can feed a family for days.
Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
A restaurant grilled cheese sandwich is going to taste perfectly good, but why pay $10 or more for a dish that’s so simple on your own? You probably won’t spend that much on a whole loaf of bread, cheese, and butter.
Tomato Soup
Restaurant soups are often too thin; using more water makes more soup and saves them money. Tomato soup is easy to make at home, and you get to achieve the perfect thickness.
Steak
A filet or ribeye in a high-end steakhouse is spectacular, but that’s really because of the quality of the meat, a cut you usually can’t find in grocery stores. But when it comes to steaks in any other kind of restaurant, you can buy the same quality meats at a store and can get better results for much less money. And if you have a good butcher’s shop nearby, you can get those top-quality cuts, too.
Dinner Rolls
Dinner rolls at restaurants are unpredictable. Sometimes, they’re perfect, but too often, they’re too hard to chew well or not hot enough for the butter to melt. Making dinner rolls on your own is easy and cheap, and you can take them from the oven exactly when you want to and serve them right away.
Pasta
What you pay for pasta dishes at a good Italian restaurant might be worth it to you, but at almost any other restaurant, what you get is likely to be no better than homemade. Pasta and dish ingredients are also cheap; for less than $10, you can feed an entire family instead of spending twice or more to feed a single person.
Eggs
A lot of people are particular about their eggs, which makes restaurant eggs hit-or-miss most of the time. Whether you like them scrambled, fried, hard-boiled, poached, or done any other way, you’re more likely to get the results you prefer by cooking them yourselves, and while breakfast tends to be the least expensive part of a restaurant menu, it still costs a lot more than making it on your own.
Sausage Gravy
This breakfast favorite, especially in the South, comes with a flexible recipe that allows you to make it however you like it. Homemade biscuits for dipping also tend to be much better than what you get in a restaurant.
Mashed Potatoes
Many more dishes are better homemade than at a restaurant, but mashed potatoes round out our list here. The common complaint about restaurant mashed potatoes is that they’re too bland or runny; you can get them just right at home and spend much less.
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