There Are 3 Ways to save Serious Cash and One Is Always Overlooked
There is more to saving money on food than resorting to cheap ingredients in discount supermarkets
Friends, I’ve been thinking about food. I mean, I’m always thinking about food, it’s one of life’s great pleasures. But I’ve more been thinking about how overlooked it is when it comes to saving cash. Together with housing and transport, food is one of the big expenditures you need to take a long hard look at if you want to really transform your finances (and thus your life).
I’ve banged on about housing and transport enough in my writing. You probably don’t need as much house as you think. Don’t wrap yourself up in expensive car leases, yadda yadda.
For many personal finance writers, food is always the afterthought. The most anyone says about it is to get your ass to a discount supermarket and don’t eat out so much.
But what if you’re not interested in the shit they sell you at your local discount supermarket because you care about quality and health? You don’t want to know how that wine is made, how that meat is reared, how those vegetables are grown because it ain’t pretty. And take it from someone who worked in the wine and food industry for nearly a decade, it certainly isn’t good for you.
There is a way out of this predicament. And actually, it’s quite a lot of fun.
You need to learn how to think - and cook - like a chef.
Because if there is something chefs can teach you, it’s how to make delicious, quality food on tight budgets.
Think like a chef, make a meal from nothing
Does this sound familiar:
You’re thinking about what you’d like to cook for dinner tonight. Let’s say you fancy a spaghetti bolognese.
You go to the fridge, there are no ingredients in order to make one, save for maybe an onion or two.
So you go out and you buy all the ingredients. But you have to buy double the amount of ground meat you need, and half ends up in the trash because you forget you have it. You use half a tin of chopped tomatoes, leaving the other half to go moldy in the fridge. The same goes for the parmesan cheese that begins to grow new lifeforms before it sees its final resting place in the bin.
This is how many people cook, I’ve seen it time and time again with friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. You think about what you want, you buy the ingredients, and half end up in the bin.
Chefs don’t have that luxury. They are bound to tight budgets and margins. They don’t want to waste a thing.
So instead of thinking, what do I want to cook tonight, they say, what do I have at my disposal and what can I make from it?
Once I learned how to think like a chef, I started to eat better, with more variety, waste less, and not feel guilty about buying good quality produce because I was actually saving money.
A salad changed my life
There is a Michelin starred restaurant in London, owned by a friend of mine, whose flagship dish is a salad. A chicory, walnut, and cheese salad.
I can’t tell you how delicious this salad is.
At the time I learned (and started to dream) about The Salad, I started a £10 a week organic vegetable box from a local farm. It was winter in the UK, so the box was largely full of cabbage. Lots of varieties of cabbage.
What the hell was I going to do with a big pile of cabbage every week?
So I started to riff on the salad. I would take a green element (cabbage), a nut element, and a cheese element. Pep it up with lemon and olive oil dressing and bang, that’s lunch, or an appetizer sorted.
I would roast the cabbage, flash fry it, braise it. I would use walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts. I would use blue cheese, manchego, mozzarella, whatever I had lying around.
Then I started to make kimchi, that deliciously pungent fermented Korean cabbage, perfect in rice bowls with a fried egg, or in a kimchi and cheese grilled sandwich.
Suddenly, I had a newfound respect for the versatility of cabbage.
Learning how to cook shouldn’t be about learning specific dishes, it should be about learning how to stick your head in a fridge and think creatively about what you can do with what’s in there.
It should be about stocking a pantry with a whole host of ingredients that are frequently used because you know 4 different ways to use cumin powder (Indian curries, chilli con carne, on The Salad, and in winter soups, in case you’re wondering).
It should be about learning how to be versatile.
The benefits of thinking like a chef are crazy-ass awesome
Discount supermarkets aren’t our way out of our food predicament. Eliminating food wastage is.
Because the average US household wastes up to 40% of their food and that’s just nuts.
Thinking and cooking like a chef come with a whole host of benefits, including saving you that 40% of your food bill:
Wasting less means you can buy better quality. I spend less than my brother does on food and yet I use markets, independent butchers, fishmongers, and fruit and vegetable stores, when he uses the cheapest supermarket down the road.
If you buy better quality, you’re eating more healthily, potentially saving you costly medical insurance or bills down the line.
Cooking is like therapy. It’s peaceful, it’s fun, you can get your kids involved, you can spend quality time with your partner.
5 ways to help you cook like a chef
Invest in some decent pantry basics. Mine will always include:
Good quality olive oil for dressings.
Sherry vinegar (because most wine vinegar sucks) and distilled white vinegar for preserves.
Onions, garlic, quality dried pasta, rice (risotto and long grain), lemons, tomatoes, cheese.
Frequently used spices.
Learn from cuisines that were born from poverty. Italy and Spain are two key ones.
Ever had pan con tomate? Toast a slice of bread, rub with a garlic clove (if you have one), smash half a tomato on there and drizzle with olive oil and a bit of salt. It’s famous in Catalonia and came from a bright spark wondering what to do with a glut of overripe tomatoes and stale bread.
Cacio e pepe is in a similar vein. An Italian pasta dish simply made with reserved starchy pasta water, a ton of black pepper, and pecorino cheese, all emuslified together into a creamy sauce. It’s magic.
Learn how to preserve, ferment and freeze excess food.
Learn how to use every part of a vegetable or meat. Chicken is a great example. Roast it for your Sunday lunch, strip the meat, and portion it up for risottos, curries, Spanish rice dishes. Roast the bones and boil them up for a couple of hours to make homemade stock that can be frozen in individual portions.
Learn how to substitute. That recipe calls for vinegar and all you have is lemon? What the recipe is really calling for is acid, so lemon or vinegar will likely work equally as well. Recipes are only someone’s interpretation of a dish. You might find you prefer your substitution better.
The bottom line
The average UK household spends around 16% of their expenditure on food. Last year, I spent 8%.
That’s around £1000 less than the average. That’s £1000 I can add to savings, or spend in other areas.
And I didn’t compromise on the quality of my food at any point. I used the grocers, the organic vegetable boxes, the local butchers, the farmer’s markets.
Because however important saving money is, I’m not keen on compromising quality, sustainability, and my ethics for the sake of saving a few quid (which I probably won’t anyway).
I love thinking and cooking like a chef and I think you might too.
As I’m living in Spain right now, I’ll say, gracias for reading, amigos! I hope you got some value out of this week’s edition of Simple + Straightforward. If you want more ramblings from me, check me out on Medium. If you’re not yet a member, I’d seriously suggest you sign up. You can do so via my referral link to give me a small portion of your membership fee, at no extra cost to you. It’s the best $5 a month I spend.
Until next time!