When you eat dinner in a restaurant, you may find that you encounter a dish or meal that you just have to have at home.
When this happens, you’ll want to know the ingredients you’ll need to prepare the food. You may also want to get a better sense of the cost of the dish to ensure that it fits within your regular grocery or cooking budget. In order to do that, there are some simple steps you can take.
1) Ask the restaurant for the recipe or ingredient list. Many restaurants publish the recipes for their best dishes online. Do a Google search to see if you can find the recipes. Once you search online, there’s a good chance someone has published or made the recipe available. If not, large chain restaurants usually have a pre-created ingredient list for each meal, to ensure that people can check for allergens. Refer to the list to get a good sense of what will go into your cooking. Alternatively, see if you can find a similar recipe online to serve as your shopping and cooking guide.
2) Figure out the cost of the ingredients. Go to the grocery store or do some online grocery shopping. Next to each ingredient, record the cost per unit. Then, multiply the unit cost for each ingredient by the number of units you’ll need.
This should give you the total amount you’ll spend on every ingredient.
3) Total it up. Total up the amount that you’re planning to spend on each ingredient in the recipe. Then, you can get a good idea of how much the meal will cost you to make. In order to save money, poke around in your kitchen and pantry first. Make sure that you don’t have some of the ingredients on the list. If you do, you can remove them and subtract those costs from the total it will cost you to make the meal.
4) Go shopping. Once you have an understanding of how much you’re going to spend (if that amount fits in your budget), go shopping. Purchase all of the ingredients and you’re ready to re-make your restaurant dish.
Other Costs to Consider
Once you get the cost of your recipe ingredients, there are other costs you may have to consider if you want to cook the meal in your kitchen. This means that you, first, need to have access to a kitchen, as well as all of the equipment like pots, pans, and utensils you need. However, if you don’t have a necessary tool, you may have to purchase it for a recipe.
For example, if you don’t have an immersion blender to make a puree, you may have to buy one in order to cook the meal. Factor all of these additional costs into the cost of making the recipe in order to get an accurate gauge of how much you’re going to spend.
One Final Method: A Recipe Cost Calculator
If you’d rather do less manual adding and work, consider using a recipe cost calculator in order to find the cost of a restaurant recipe. A recipe cost calculator can find prices for you and automate some of the work, so you can focus on making delicious food and not having to add numbers before you do it.
