What does Hamburger Helper taste like? I’m English
Poverty.
Yep sounds like it
It tastes like being poor.
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
Kinda like kraft dinner with minced meat. It’s pretty good.
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.
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.
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 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.
It is. I guess I should have been more precise but the name of the product is Hamburger Helper so I went with it.
Jokes on them, I can’t even afford hamburger anymore.
I ate plenty of hamburger helper in my life….thought it was pretty good….
Ground beef? In this economy?
Try it with hot dogs!
This makes me so fucking mad. It was already garbage poor people food, but the fact that food manufacturers are acknowledging that it may be too expensive to use the meat that is in the fucking name without actually doing anything to reduce prices is mind-bogglingly callous and/or tonedeaf.
Try it with Lentils (until they’re too expensive too…)
The soy China no longer buys?
Time for some cheap Soy burritos for the Cyberpunk setting.
Oh look at fancy pants over here! We would be lucky to afford monkey wieners.
We need Billionaire Helper when we start eating the rich
Luigi just gave them some help.
I’m disgusted at the thought of eating hamurger helper. We ate it too often as a kid and it’s just worse than kraft mac and cheese. I’d rather add hot dogs or chicken nuggets to the latter if I need to have a cheap/depressing dinner.
Powdered Cheese is ass. Eat the rich.
You say that like the two are mutually exclusive.
I’ll enjoy mixing the meat of the rich into my artificially-cheesed hamburger helper, thank you very much.
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You haven’t had the right recipe. You need a lot of acidity to cut through the richness.
Sick of winning yet?
w/o the hamburger of course
No joke it gives the same vibe as those Oddworld ads for some random processed food (à la Soylent Green) made out of the dug-up bones of their own people
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?
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.
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.
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
Try with acorn shells!
I hear a acornmeal is pretty healthy. Hard to make though
Just put all the neighborhood squirrels on leashes and dig up the ¾ of the nuts they forget about.
Try with Soylent Green!
but I hear it’s peeepulll
Made by the people, of the people, for the people! Where’s your patriotism??
It’s OK, it’s from that new factory in El Salvador. It’s not like it’s real (i.e. white) people!
Maybe even peo-pulp!
That is more expensive then beef! And an abomination so foul that even god would look away.
Hamburger helper is good yes, but I’m in the mood for eating the rich yum!
Good thing it’s Lemmy and not Reddit, so save for a few instances, you can say that.
almost like you need to seize the means of distribution to have democratical rights upheld
Fuck Reddit
wtf is a hamburger helper and how is it helping me making hamburgers
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?
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’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.
It probably helps to understand ‘hamburger’ in this sense is very low quality minced/ground beef*
*might be ‘beef’
