Pizza, Lasagna, Ribs, Fried Chicken.
It's bye week which means two things:
- For the team - #DDSS. Just rehab whatever is nagging, watch film, and take it more like a camp week than a game week.
- For us - we can write about whatever the hell we want. I will have a couple pieces to put out re: looking back at Boise. But today I'm not going to write about that.
What do these 3 foods have in common?
For the most part, they are not worth the effort to make at home. Minimal ROI.
When it comes to food, I'm all about value. We've discussed before that the comparison of In N Out and Five Guys is stupid because they are not directly competing with each other and focus on different price points.
Pizza
I've made pizza before. At the height of the pandemic I got a pizza oven kit for my Weber Kettle. I could get that sucker up to almost 900 degrees. It turned a good pie.
But it took so much charcoal to get that hot. And to get teh dough done just right you had to make it the day before. And then working fast to keep it all from sticking to your paddle as you transfer it to your stone.
I found it just wasn't worth it. EATING pizza is a lot more fun than MAKING it.
Lasagna
I think most American households probably keep a spare lasagna in the freezer. At least if they don't, they should. There's my LPT (Life Pro Tip) for you.
Lasagna is good. Really good. It's a giant pile of carbs and cheese. It also brings the deep philsophical realization that a lasanga can be divided - you can cut it in half and now you have two, or you can cut it horizontally and have two thinner ones - but it cannot be added. If you stack lasagna on top of another lasagana, now you just have one thicker lasagna.
#meta
But lasagna, like pizza, is a lot of work. You have to make the sauce. then cook the noodles. And then mix the ricotta. And you have to buy ricotta because who uses ricotta for anything but lasagna, and then you have to layer it all and STILL have to cook it when you could've already been done making any other pasta dish.
And for what - a payoff that is 95% more work than Stauffer's for maybe 20% better lasagna.
Ribs
If you make them, don't wrap them. They're good, but messy. Never satisfying as a full meal on their own. If you're going to make a rib, a beef rib gives a lot more meat.
People overcomplicate them with this rub and that sauce adn wrap then unwrap then rewrap. Just cook them until they're almost done and glaze. Don't mess around with that 3-2-1 business. It takes 5-ish hours to yield not a lot of meat.
There have been studies that show that eating a meal is much more enjoyable if you didn't make it. I love the process of cooking, but the payoff of the pizza, lasagna and ribs just doesn't justify the experience of eating it afterward. It can be stressful trying to pull a full multi-course meal together all at once and make sure everything is timed perfectly and then if you have two toddlers and getting everybody sat down together and eating it while it is still hot? Good luck.
The much better way to eat ribs: when you go to your favorite BBQ joint and ask for 1-2 bones to go along wtih everything else you ordered.
Also at the BBQ joint (unless you don't have one good nearby) - brisket. You get so much meat that you are either feeding a crowd (which is when it is worth it) otherwise you're going to have tons and tons of leftovers and be burnt out of burnt ends by the end. The payoff is much faster with tri-tip being done in ~40 minutes vs 12+ hours. And cooking a chuck roast like a brisket is also faster and more scalable for a regular family meal.
Skip the brisket unless it's a special occasion.
Fried Chicken
Lastly, as I broke the sabbath to get Popeye's last night since I was the only person in my family who wasn't sick and didn't feel like cooking, fried chicken.
Fried chicken is actually very easy to make. It just stinks up your entire house. Use a pan on your Blackstone outside if you have one, it'll help with teh smell. But you either have to deal with getting all your oil back into a container so you can reuse it later, or waste a lot of oil. Economies of scale are at play here and you're chasing marginal gains over any chicken chain.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Don't stink up your hosue. Don't have to worry about changing into your grease clothes.