As long as it ain’t Avocado Toast, the right people will eat it all up.
I get the point but damn I love Hamburger Helper.
They can’t even afford hamburger to throw in there so I know this cap. How do poor people look at a big box of noodles for $1 and a small box of noodles and seasoning for $2 and buy hberger helper with no hamburger?
Beef is unaffordable and hamburger helper is more expensive than buying the basic ingredients.
You can just order a hamburger via uber eats™ for only 30 dollars. Youtubers told me that’s really smart actually
What does Hamburger Helper taste like? I’m English
Well what you do is take some hamburger mean and fry it up. Not as patty form but more like taco meat. There is a season pack that is pretty much taco seasoning and there is elbow mac in the box. After you put eh season in and stir it around dump the mac in and stir it around then add some water and let it simmer for a while. I was poor as a child and ate a lot of this shit. It was cheap and was designed to stretch hamburger meat out. There are different flavors but it all taste the same. When I was in the military we called it chilli-mac. Same shit. If I am hungry I will eat it if offered but I will not go looking for it.
Serious question, what’s the difference between “hamburger meat in taco meat form” and ground beef? Because it sounds like ground beef to me.
It is. I guess I should have been more precise but the name of the product is Hamburger Helper so I went with it.
It is ground beef
Most people I know refer to it as ground beef when it’s still in the tube/tray/whatever before being cooked. Taco meat is ground beef that’s been seasoned, finely chopped, and browned in a skillet.
So it’s just instant macaroni cheese mixed in with beef? That really is poor man food.
Well it’s not all cheesy flavored but it’s essentially flavor *paste seasoning and noodles to be mixed with a pound of ground beef. For example beef stroganoff is gravy noodles
Except you have to provide your own beef mince.
I think I’ll stick to lasagne.
It’s like taco meat mixed with Mac and cheese but with less flavor to both. Honestly anyone’s just better off making taco Mac
Taco Mac? So do I spice the meat like taco meat and just add cheese? I’m intrigued 🤔
So usually when I make Taco Mac I use leftover taco meat and mix it with box Mac and cheese. It’s kinda a default leftovers meal for us since the kids will actually eat it and with good taco seasoning it tastes pretty good to us grownups too
Poverty.
Yep sounds like it
Kinda like kraft dinner with minced meat. It’s pretty good.
It tastes like being poor.
Can’t afford hamburger. It’s tuna helper now.
The good tuna isn’t cheap either. I don’t want the quasi cat food from a can.
The bad tuna is out of reach due to price, Beef is about $5 a pound here (the amount needed for a box of helper) and even the bad tuna is almost $2 a can now. You need about 3 cans to make the amount needed so even the quasi cat food is more then beef.
If you have a restaurant supply store in your area, and you can deal with enormous quantities of food and have ways to freeze what you make, they sell 4 pound cans of white tuna that are 2/3rds the price per pound of smaller cans. Or split with friends, I don’t know. Or try Walmart, they stepped up their grocery offerings, at least in Montreal, and boycotting the USA and Israel BAD aside, we gotta look out for ourselves first.
I have tried to buy the giant cans of tuna before, as a single individual it is a terrible idea. Tuna freezes like shit, and when its bad its both ends bad. I used to eat quite a bit of the crappy cans of tuna when they where under a $1 per. But last time I was in the store the off brand “cheap” tuna was $2.25 (same price as the canned chicken oddly).
I just point out that beef (at least in this part of Canada) is cheaper then tuna per 100g. These “saving” recipes are often out of touch and out of date.
in my experience the cost of fish in general depends a lot on how closely you live to the sea. i lived close to the sea for a few months during a job, and fish was really cheap there. can’t say whether it’s the same for the US.
Nice assumption that people can afford the hamburger needed. Boxed mac and cheese is more likely, or if milk and butter is also too costly, ramen.
Must be with they started putting “try it with hot dogs” on the package.
Even though hotdogs by weight are more then ground beef (the people who make the food don’t understand food apparently) and make a terrible add. Hamburger helper is not even a good price on its own, its like a $3 sidekick. Boxed mac and cheese can be found for about a $1 (sometimes) and can be made with just water and margarine (its not good but most of us have had to at some point). If you want to add hotdogs to a box of stuff its going to be the mac&cheese, not the helper. To make a box of helper in my area you are looking at $10 at best ($3 for the box, $5 for the meat and $2 for the milk), and it feeds maybe two people.
This is the let them eat cake moment, but much stupider. Beans and rice have almost doubled in price in the last few years here, that is an indicator of a crisis. This is not any way even a band aid, hamburger helper is just an easy meal for busy people who still want something hot, not in anyway cheap.
We need Billionaire Helper when we start eating the rich
Luigi just gave them some help.
You can’t afford to have your cake, so you can’t eat it.
I mean that was the case back then too
Is this some marketing campaign or something.
Why am I suddenly seeing so many posts mentioning some cheap American junk food I’ve never even heard of before?
It’s a couple of different factors at play:
- Sales of this particular product are up and Fox News, the largest and most influential conservative media source, ran a story about it as if it’s a sign of the nostalgic return of something today’s old people remember from their youth.
- Most younger people correctly recognize that this trash is actually a bad sign for the economy, because it reflects a shift down market where people are opting to make this stuff instead of the more expensive option of restaurants or takeout.
- Consistent with worsening economic conditions, the price of beef in the United States is skyrocketing, so that the product itself is changing the label to recommend replacing the beef (which customers would ordinarily buy separately) with something else, like cheaper hot dogs.
The political and economic discussion is happening in the United States, and that generally means that it spills out onto the internet where national borders are less significant for where conversations might end up.
Might be that it’s because Lemmy is such a small place. We had the hamburger helper meme in all yesterday and now people are posting about the general concept.
Jokes on them, I can’t even afford hamburger anymore.
We are going to be the ones eating dogs and cats soon.
wtf is a hamburger helper and how is it helping me making hamburgers
Hamburger Helper is a boxed pasta mix you add to ground beef to increase the volume and “make it go farther”.
TBH, it’s not awful.
It probably helps to understand ‘hamburger’ in this sense is very low quality minced/ground beef*
*might be ‘beef’
It…. Doesn’t help make hamburgers.
Hamburger helper is a boxed spice mix, you also need ground meat, then you brown the meat and add the seasoning mix. You end up with sorta a taco meat (different flavor of course) that you can then eat, mix with pasta.
It’s…. Fine? But it’s pretty depressing in this context.
it sounds depressing tbh but i never had it so take my opinion with a big bag of salt
Have eaten it. It’s depressing. I think it’s like 1600 kCal for the mix and ~0.5kg of Lean Ground Beef.
Edit: Big bag of salt included. You will feel bloated for days.
It can be okay. I like to add peas and depending on the type beans. Just to make it a bit more nutritional
Goulash is better, and just as cheap. Fuck national corpo scum.
The problem with goulash (and soups in general) is the time commitment. A struggling parent often doesn’t have an hour to wait for soup to boil. Hamburger Helper comes together in 15-20 minutes, tops.
So it helps hamburgers?
It’s because Americans on the whole think “ground beef” is “hamburger”. Like the lettuce is “salad” thing.
They need an anthropomorphic glove to sell them on the idea of adding a protein to a carbohydrate so they can manage to feed their families.
I only eat greens cause if I don’t that green giant will go from jolly to angry and nobody wants that
Lmao this is the sickest roast I’ve ever seen of my college ex, thanks
Hopefully he’s finally learned how to cook.
It’s basically mac and cheese with cut up hotdogs in it. Or like carbonara, with beef instead of ham. You brown some ground beef (hamburger meat, if you have never cooked anything fancy before and only know it as “that stuff you use to make hamburgers”). Then once it’s browned, you add some water, maybe milk or butter if the particular box calls for it, and the pasta+seasoning mix from the box. It basically turns into some variation of macaroni and cheese, with ground beef added.
TBH, it’s actually not awful in terms of taste. It’s as “peasant food” as peasant food can get; cheap, filling, easy to make, absolutely loaded with calories, and hopefully not awful tasting. It’s awful for you, and you’ll probably feel awful after eating it. But it checks most of the boxes that a broke and overworked parent needs to be able to feed their kids a hot meal 15 minutes after they get home from work. Just swing by the store on your way home, grab a box of Hamburger Helper and a pound of ground beef. Now you’ve fed the whole family for like $8 total.
It is a shelf, stable pasta and cheese mix that you are supposed to mix with a pound of ground beef to make an easy stove top meal. Tldr it’s kind of like Kraft dinner but different cheese.
I don’t know why they call it hamburger HELPER. It does just fine all by itself.
Can you clarify if you mean hamburger is fine by itself or if the sodium packed box mix is fine without the hamburger.
One answer will probably have The Hague asking for your location.
You don’t get the joke.
I definitely got it. But the joke raises ethical questions.
In Finland, there is a dish called “Nistipata” or “Junkie’s pot”. It’s the cheapest macaroni with the cheapest mincemeat. Gourmets add ketchup.
Sounds like a perfect comparison.
