There’s a program here on BBC2 right now called Take on the Takeaway. The idea is that a top chef is called in to a home where the people there tend to live off too many takeaways stating that they’re cheaper and taste better etc. Usually people who barely cook and can’t be bothered to try! They do a price test, speed test and taste test.
This evening whilst cooking dinner I had a thought about this. Our dinner this evening was pretty easy as we’ve been a bit snowed with work and we’re away from tomorrow so I figured we’d go for burgers and potato wedges. Now admittedly I didn’t create the burgers from scratch, but I do have the best burgers on the block! Marks and Spencers Aberdeen Angus Burgers. For those of you who don’t know, Marks and Spencers is, besides Harrods, the most expensive food shop in the UK, and Aberdeen Angus beef is the best beef you can get. Oh and M and S food is heaven!!
So let’s compare this to something simple, a Burger King Aberdeen Angus Burger with Cheese, which costs around £4 I believe. We had 2 quarter pound burgers each, both with lettuce, cheese, fried onions, each in a burger bun. Dave also had fresh sliced tomato, I went for tomato ketchup. Plus we had potato wedges on the side. The cost of our burgers plus trimmings works out to around 90p. Plus the cost of wedges, maybe 30p per person. The price test therefore works out to £2.10 per person for the home cooked burgers and wedges, compared to around £10 for the takeaway.
The speed test is hard to compare. The wedges do take a while as they are oven cooked for 25 minutes, plus the heating of the oven. However the burgers take less than 5 minutes on the george foreman grill, about the time I need to prepare the rolls and trimmings. I would guess that the speed test would be fairly equal if burger king delivered, going by other delivery times around here. 30-45 minutes is standard.
Finally the taste test. Well I’ve tried both and can say without any bias that ‘The Angus’ as the BK burger is known, is no way a quarter pound burger for a start, it’s think as heck! It doesn’t taste succulent and the cheese is pretty mild. The burgers we have are juicy and succulent, about 4 times the thickness of the BK burger, has cheddar cheese on top, lovely and tasty, and just taste far, far better!
So the vote here is easy. £2.10 compared to £10 for a dinner, and the latter doesn’t even come close when it comes to tasty.
