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What's the most expensive food you splurge on to make you happy?
I'm a person of expensive tastes. It's very hard to make me happy foodwise. I love fancy stuff. I'd probably be happier with three star fine dining than street food. I actually like tinned cavier. What about you? What's an expensive luxury food you splash out on to make you feel fancy?
(with apologies/thanks to @mrbig - also most of the above isn't true, I love cheap food as well as haute cuisine)
Sushi, probably.
Ditto. High-end sushi/sashimi is one of my absolute favorite things. But TBH, even the cheaper and/or all-you-can-eat level sushi can satisfy me too. Grocery store sushi is pushing it a bit too far for me to really enjoy though.
Edit: My family ordered sushi tonight, since this got me craving it. :P
I have no issues with grocery store sushi. If I feel like some sushi, it usually hits the spot just fine. That said, I do also enjoy going to a nice sushi restaurant and ordering a bunch of things to share.
The firmer texture of the old, chilled rice in grocery store sushi has always seriously detracted from my enjoyment of it. It's a decent enough option purely for sating hunger, and so I still eat it occasionally too, but it definitely doesn't make me happy (which is what this topic is about). :P
Sushi gets my vote as well. Nothing beats fresh salmon rolls… salmon egg maki … mmmm.
Oh god I'm hungry now.
Never had sushi, still on my list.
When you come around to it, I'd advise you to stay away from the super heavy rolls and stick to some basic cut rolls, nigiri, and sashimi. 🍣
Oh yeah, sashimi looks cool.
The fancy ice cream.
There's cheaper ones that have way more volume, but I like to splurge and get myself the nice fancy kind that seems creamier and has better tasting flavours. Maybe I convince myself of that because it's more expensive, but it makes me feel nice.
Absolutely the same for me. Unfortunately, my favorite ice cream brand closed because of the pandemic, and I haven't found a good replacement yet.
Was it, by any chance, three twins?
It was! I'm so sad it's gone. I have found a small ice cream shop that still serves their stuff, but it's a pretty long drive to get there, so I can't have it too often.
It really was a shame. My family used to get the 3 packs of vanilla at Costco. It was some of the best ice cream outside of specialty stores.
It's no delusion, fancy ice cream is better. That's not to say there's a strict correlation between price and quality, but the most mainstream brands are just not that great. They're aiming for mass production, product stability, long shelf life, cheap ingredients (wallet-oriented appeal) and stuff like adding a lot of sugar to appeal to children. Fancy ice cream usually has only a handful of ingredients and is oriented towards ingredient quality, ingredient uniqueness (such as less typical fruits), flavor purity (more fruit/cocoa/cream, less sugar) and traditional processes (goes bad much faster and is less resistant to temperature changes). Each one of these drives up the cost.
Here's the list of stuff that goes into ben & jerry's famous cookie dough ice cream, which I find cloying (most to least):
cream 27%
water
skimmed milk concentrate
white sugar
wheat flour
brown sugar
egg yolks
butter
vegetable oil (soy, coconut)
eggs
cocoa paste
low fat powdered cocoa
molasses
vanilla extract
stabilizers (guar gum, carrageenans)
salt
cocoa butter
natural vanilla and brown sugar flavoring with other natural flavorings
natural butter flavoring
emulsifier (soy lecithin)
butter concentrate
So this is just a guess but I tried to split those ingredients into ice cream and cookie dough. I don't think Ben and Jerry's ice-cream is all that bad by supermarket ice-cream standards, and if I'm right this is almost the same ingredients I'd use at home for a classic creme anglaise based ice-cream. I'd use cream and milk, but cream and water+milk powder is the same thing. They probably use more sugar than me, and my stabiliser mix has locust bean gum as well as carrageenan and guar gum, but same same.
Ice cream:
cream 27%
water
skimmed milk concentrate
white sugar
egg yolks
vanilla extract
stabilizers (guar gum, carrageenans)
Cookie dough:
wheat flour
brown sugar
butter concentrate
butter
vegetable oil (soy, coconut)
eggs
cocoa paste
low fat powdered cocoa
molasses
emulsifier (soy lecithin)
salt
cocoa butter
natural vanilla and brown sugar flavoring with other natural flavorings
natural butter flavoring
What I've been trying to do for a few years is an ultra-pure ice-cream base with as few ingredients as possible. You can lose the egg yolks if you get the hydrocolloid (stabiliser) mix right, which means you can make milk ice-cream. Done with top quality milk it's a beautifully clean, pure flavour and very light on the palate. Or you can throw in loads of cereal and make breakfast ice-cream. Obviously any mix which works with plain milk will work with fruit juices or purees too, although I'm not sure where the line between ice-cream and sorbet comes.
Ben & Jerry's is a "Superpermium" brand, which is the highest quality tier the International Dairy Foods Association certifies. The key metrics behind which tier a tub of ice cream can be labeled with are fat content and the amount of air in the mixture. Higher quality ice creams have more dairy fat and less air, resulting in a denser, creamier product. There is also the nebulous requirement that the manufacturer use the "best quality ingredients".
Here are the ingredients in Ben & Jerry's vanilla ice cream:
So basically you nailed it.
Fancy ice cream also has a hell of a lot more dairy fat, which is why it tastes creamier.
Booze.
I like mixing cocktails and it's insane how fast you can burn through your bank if you don't buy the cheapest stuff, because up to a certain point, the differences in taste are extreme.
Plus the sheer amount of different bottles you have to buy if you expand your cocktail breadth. $41.75 for a bottle of Cointreau here, you buy it to make a cocktail or two and then it sits there for a while waiting for the next time you want to make that one cocktail.
Yeah I know the pain. I've now gotten mold on my Coco Lopez twice because I opened it to make a Pina Colada and then forgot about it. At least that's just a 5€ item but I already forced myself to finish a Lillet Blanc that had been opened unchilled for too long and had a dark colour. It didn't taste too bad but still. There is also an open Sweet Vermouth, Aperol and Campari that all have too low alcohol contents that they can actually go bad.
I'd recommend Mixel. It's an absolutely fantastic app with great devs that allows you to maximize your booze with a metric shitton of cocktail recipes drawn from books, the internet and even the official IBA recipes. And it searches based on the ingredients you have so you can select one you want to use up and find the cocktails that use it.
If you have space to display your booze though, it becomes a legitimate way to spice up your kitchen though. Mine is hidden in cabinet right now though.
Lower alcohol things like vermouths I throw in the fridge, supposedly lasts longer that way. I might also use those wine stoppers that have a pump to remove the air from the bottle, but I don't have enough to go around and I'm too lazy to buy more.
That's the pain I feel though, and nowadays I just keep a small bar and drink the same cocktails I like.
It'll sound silly, but pizza. There's a place near me that makes really really good Chicago-style deep dish pizza, and it's not cheap. It's the thing that makes me really happy, though. There's more expensive things I eat from time to time for the sake of novelty, but to make me happy? Deep dish pizza.
Well, a KFC bucket is quite expensive around here, and I love it. Also, a really good Brazilian all you can eat churrascaria (barbecue joint), even more so when you add beverages.
So I'll go with that.
There's a place in Niagara Falls called the Copacabana that is a Rodizio restaurant, and it's one of my favourite places to go on a splurge date-night. I love everything about that place.
There are a few of these kinds of restaurants here in the US, and they're always great. They will probably be the death of me. (death via meat sweats)
For me the most regular high-end food I buy is top quality tea. Single estate African English Breakfast is my jam at the moment, but I like Houji-cha and a nice Chinese green as well. I'm lucky to have a very good tea shop near where I live and even very expensive tea isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
Me and my wife do save up for trips to fancy restaurants maybe once a year or so. I'd much rather go for one £300 meal than ten £30 pub lunches. Not that we've managed either since the kid was born and then the pandemic, but hopefully again soon!
I've been getting back into tea recently after a few years away. It's weird. Compared to Tetley's it is very expensive and at the top end it can very expensive yet you can get incredible tasting, fresh, small farm, historically important teas at very affordable price per gram. Today's cup was a Yunnan Gold Needle black tea which cost me ~£5 for 25g which is around 10 servings worth (though you'll get multiple glasses out off every serving). Expensive, yet super cheap.
It's hard to for me to pick a favourite because you can have such different flavours from looseleaf. A white can be mellow, sweet and fruity compared to a black or oolong that might be in your face malty and chocolatey and they are both very different drinking experiences. The only ones i know i dont like are pu'ers, at least the 3 pu'ers i have tried so far have tasted like wet dog, not a massive fan of Lapsang souchong either (marmite of the tea world) .
I've managed to, mostly, escape the very expensive part of tea, that being teaware. I was very close to buying a handmade clay tea set from etsy the other day though but my beaker and sieve setup is working for me at the moment.
I have cast iron teapots and they were pretty pricey (£20-30) each and that's about the fanciest I go with teaware. But they are really great, and you can warm them on the hob which saves quite a lot of effort. Also they will last forever.
They're not so good for white teas (I have a cheap glass one for those) but I have one iron pot just for green and one for black.
£300 in that example was for two of us, but I have paid that much per-head a couple of times. I do go to plenty of £20-30/head places. I've had some perfectly pleasant meals for that sort of price in local pubs and restaurants, or for far less from market stalls and so on (I LOVE my local market for food). But they're rarely special in the way that high end dining is, it's a whole different level of experience.
Ten years ago I went to The Fat Duck for lunch, at that point it was the best restaurant in the world (technically El Bulli was number one but it had just closed after the rankings came out). It remains the most expensive meal I've ever had, the bill for 6 people was over £1500, and only half of us had the wine flight. I can remember that entire meal. Every bite, every texture, every flavour combination, every surprise (the cup of tea which was cold on one side of the cup and hot on the other particularly stands out). It's hard to describe the entirely different league that world-class fine dining exists in compared to even nice high-street restaurants. It's like the difference between a Skoda and a Bentley. There's nothing wrong with Skodas (I drive one) and you can have a perfectly good drive in one. But the Bentley just refines everything several steps higher. Every single possible part is tweaked and adjusted and created purely to be the best it can possibly be, not to compromise on price. Top-end food is just incredible. Most restaurants I think "if I had these ingredients I could make this" but not then. I didn't even know how half of it could have been done, let alone have the skills to do it. That's as much a feature of Blumenthal's particular style of molecular gastronomy as anything else though (the guy has a special medical-grade water purifier just to make water to cook green beans in, so they stay extra green).
And it's not just the food, it's everything. Move to stand up and a member of staff fades into existence behind you to move your chair out. They re-appear when you get back to do the opposite. Service is quiet and discreet but perfectly synchronised - the entire table's plates hit the table at the exact same time (which requires 1:1 ratio of service staff to diners). They noticed I was left-handed before pouring us water which has never happened, I always have to move the glass, often several times in a meal. The level of attention paid is astonishing. Everything is anticipated and seamless and perfect, down to the smallest detail.
I've had less expensive, and less memorable/pleasurable weekend breaks than that one meal. I would take that one five hour lunch over a weekend in Bruges (man, fuck Bruges) any day.
I've been to several other 3 star restaurants and they're all the same in terms of luxury and quality, even though the food is usually radically different.
Prime ribeye cap. Once a cheap butcher's cut until people found out about it and now it's as much as a normal ribeye. However I think the size is more appropriate for a single person than a traditional ribeye. Salt, pepper, reverse sear in cast iron. When steaks are within 5-10° of done, extract from oven and set aside. Clarified butter/ghee, garlic, rosemary in pan, bring to high heat where the garlic is begins to fry, return steaks to pan and baste in butter to sear outside. Serve with blue cheese compound butter, whatever side you're using to justify the decadence of the steak, and a cocktail. Bliss.
For regular day-to-day grocery shopping, I have a few things that I buy now that I would never have splurged on when I was poorer:
Food is basically entertainment for me so I will splurge on whatever high end ingredients I can get when making a dish.
Someone bought me a bottle of this for a present this year and I'm not sure I can go back to the £2-a-litre stuff in plastic bottles. At least not for a finishing sauce, it's a bit of a waste to use the good stuff in sauces and so on.
Agreed on the sauce part, but I will use it occasionally in marinades depending on what I am making. The good stuff really is life-changing, culinarily speaking.
I got real into asian style dishes and wok cooking over the pandemic. Got a favorite brand of soy sauce?
Also yea, the "real" bacon that I can pick up from the local boutique grocery store, that they make on-site and slice it right in front of me. Beats any supermarket bacon no contest.
The stuff that I buy is Yamaroku brand but if someone has something a bit better, I want to try it!
They have two different products:
More info about it here. I buy mine off Amazon but I'm sure there are better places to order it from.
The stuff I have is Kishibori and it's exceptionally delicious, but I haven't had the Yamaroku to compare it to.
That reminds me of some delicious pale temari that I got at the grocery store a couple years ago. I’ve been looking for it recently, but haven’t been able to find it.
Shellfish. We honestly don't have tons of money, so if I can have shrimp it feels like a birthday feast.
Filet Mignon. (It's almost impossible to screw up (Looking at you, former US president.))
Dry Aged as a special treat.
Most rarely, great food and fancy juice from Outback steakhouse (more specifically, the barbecue ribs), which tastes great. Not sure how expensive it is where you live but where I live in Brazil it's expensive.
Sometimes my parents bought Nutella for me, tho also not sure if it's expensive where you live, I heard it's not too expensive in Europe where the ingredients come from, but here in Brazil people use "Nutella" as a term for being comfortable, weak or sensitive.
Otherwise, I can't really name any food my parents have splurged on with any frequency.
It's a common breakfast spread, and there's certainly more upmarket (and notably, without palm oil) option where I live. In France it's listed at 3.79€ (about 4.6 USD, 23.4 BRL).
Medium duck breast that’s been spiced and cooked properly is phenomenal - also not very common unfortunately. I also quite like escargot.
Edit: Oh, and fatty tuna is definitely on this list.
I have this five spices duck breast recipe we usually do for Christmas; I understand where you're coming from !
Please share!
Five spices duck breast (serves 2)
2 duck breasts (350g)
Marinade
1 Tbsp. honey
3 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp neutral oil
2 tsp five spices powder
Let the meat marinate for 1h (minimum).
Pre-heat an oven to 100°C
Briefely sear the meat on both sides (2min on skin, 1 on meat), then put in the oven on a plate with a temperature proble until it reaches around 56°C (circa 45min).
Honey sauce
Some Oil
1 onion
1 small piece of ginger
100ml chicken stock
3 Tbsp honey
3 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
Whatever has rendered in the oven
Quickly fry onion and ginger in oil, then add honey, vinegar, stock and reduce until a saucy consistency.
I usually serve with some rice and sauteed vegetable
Similarly, Peking Duck is my all-time favorite meal, but can be incredibly expensive where I live, and also typically has to be ordered 24-48hrs in advance too... So I only get it once a year for my birthday.
Duck confit is also up there for me as well, but is similarly hard to find and expensive so I have only ever managed to have it a few times in my life at very high-end restaurants I've been to.
p.s. Sorted Foods did an episode where they bought canned Duck confit, and even though it looked absolutely horrendous out of the can, it looked surprisingly amazing once it was actually cooked. So I have been tempted to give it a try for myself ever since, especially since the price is reasonable. And there is actually a frozen variety I can even get here in Canada. So you should maybe try checking if there is a similar product you can get in your region too. :)
Are you in the region where you can easily get snow goose? Highly recommended if it’s easily available to you.
I don't know about snow goose specifically, but there are various varieties of goose and duck available very occasionally at our local whole-animal butcher. But the biggest problem is that I honestly don't have the confidence to try and cook or confit one for myself. And I would feel like absolute trash if I ruined a whole goose or duck, especially at the price we would have to pay for it. :/
It's not necessarily the most expensive food related thing I buy, but in the spirit of the question, coffee and especially espresso at home. Good coffee is expensive - a traceable single origin light roast is going to be around $40-50/lb.
Then, if you actually want to make good espresso (and not that pressurized portafilter crap you get from the cheaper espresso machine stuff), you're looking at ~$1000 for a good espresso machine. But you also need a really good burr grinder to get that superfine consistency you want for espresso. That can be ~$300.
The reality is that a good cafe is probably the best choice if you want espresso drinks - it takes a lot of coffee to make up that difference, and the beans as mentioned aren't completely negligible either. Sometimes, homemade isn't cheaper. But hey, it's a fun thing to fiddle with and does produce good results at the end.
Luxury shellfish medley. A friend and I would hit up a fancy seafood restaurant and shell out—har, har—a hundred euros or two—for an extravagant platter of scallops, clams, razor clams, crab, lobster, shrimp, mussels, oysters, and more. The works. It's staring all the shellfish cast of The Little Mermaid.
I love how the ocean tastes. I love the aroma and steam and juices. I love the sound of shells cracking. I love the dramatic arrangements and presentation.
This indulgence is only for rare special occasions like getting a new job or an old friend visiting from another continent.
I live right on the coast and there's enough fishermen here you can find a handful selling out of their pickups trucks in parking lots every summer. The local McDonald's and Subway both have seasonal lobster sandwiches, which seems to amuse tourists. And man, prices even here have been going bonkers for the last two or three years, mostly due to demand inland and I hear demand from China. Clams have been hit the worst!
I don't even eat meat anymore but I feel like an old lady now, "you know, we used to be able to get a lobster roll for $12 Canadian..."
Shellfish and that "general oceany" taste is definitely something that can't really be replicated.
Not really a luxury food, but I’m a big peanut butter snob.
Peanut butter should have one or two ingredients: peanuts, and maybe salt. Nothing else. You should have to stir it before eating (and keep it in the fridge if you want it to stay mixed). Almost all the other stuff is just sugary peanut paste. When I was making a lot less money, we’d always go for Crazy Richards. Today I go for Teddie, but Smuckers Natural will do in a pinch. I prefer crunchy in terms of mouthfeel, but creamy is easier to deal with when using.
A quality A5 wagyu steak. I'll be the first to say that Kobe beef is a bit overrated compared to "regular" wagyu of similar grade from Japan, but the divide between prime angus and kuroge wagyu is night and day. It doesn't even taste like the same animal. It's rich, buttery, flavorful, and clean. It's so good that using anything other than a bit of salt and pepper actually takes away from the experience. Even completely raw, eaten as sashimi, it's amazing.
I've been thinking about this question for a while and I realized that there are two restaurants that have made me consistantly happy every time I have been there, and they are both surprisingly simelar. Heck, they're both technically chain restaurants.
One is Din Tai Fung, because xiao long bao is really great and they make the best. They're also crazy overpriced.
The other one is Hai Di Lao, which is an amazing hot pot restaurant. I'm not sure if there is more than one in the US right now, but it's something I would recommend to anyone because going there is an experience in itself. You check in to eat, and while you wait for a table they give you snacks and games to play. You might also be able to sit in a massage chair and get your nails done there. But of course the food is the main event, and everything is good; there's a huge amount of choices for soup bases, meats, vegitables, sauces, and all kinds of add-ons and sides. And while you eat there are entertainers walking around. It's like going to Disneyland for dinner.
A dinner at whatever restaurant is currently my favorite in my hometown of Asheville. Several years ago it was the admiral, bit I think quality may have decline. Pre-pandemic it was Jargon. I don’t know what’s cooking there now.
For celebrations or even just that special meal, I like to go somewhere that'll serve a big pile of juicy, delicious barbecue. I've got a couple places: Lucille's (a chain I'm not sure the reach of) and Tulsa Rib Company, a local restaurant with a few locations, are my favorites. There was this local place run by a family from Tennessee that was amazing, and was my first introduction to collard greens, and sent my dad back to his time in Kentucky after the Army (in a good way), but they changed owners, then closed, shortly after we went there the first time.
The other thing would be beer. I don't know for sure how the valuation works, but per ounce of alcohol, I'm always going to spend more on beer than I will on whiskey (the most expensive whiskey I've had was Johnnie Walker Blue, IIRC, but I'll chuck $15 at 32 oz of craft brew). I feel like even if I get one big beer, vs 20 glasses of Scotch, the beer provides the better experience. As far as which beer, if I'm dropping some coin it's going to be something strong, like an imperial stout, cider, or double IPA that provide richness and complexity of flavor.
The most expensive thing I love is probably gyros and bifteki at the local Greek restaurant. Greece knows how to handle meat.