Struggle Meals was exactly this.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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I'm going to date myself, but we used to have this show called Yan can cook. Chinese guy teaching you cheap ways to cook Chinese food.
How tag line "Yan can cook. And so can you." Dude is a legend.
No slam dunk.
Yan taught me I can use a cleaver for everything
Because of him I also use the cleaver for 95% of my cooking. Except I now have 4 different sized cleavers.
My favorite cleaver is the veggie cleaver I got from Japan. It's super thin and glides through veggies.
Atomic Shrimp does this all the time - I sorta believe that his £1 / 2 days challenge might have been the basis of some MP misunderstanding it and claiming that people can live on 50p/day
Look up Jack Monroe.
Because cooking Rice & Beans is just a 5 minute YouTube video, not a culinary series.
BUT exploring how the addition of stuff like rice to regional dishes in order to increase yield… how techniques of necessity like that helped evolve traditional cuisine in the south, Cajun and Creole cooking… also how ingredients of necessity like potatoes are not just a random starch but a life blood and the source of a thousand dishes… stuff like that is worth a series.
I think there really could be a great cooking show that highlights stuff like that; especially as a vehicle to show how to turn traditional wisdom into practice.
A lot of shows start with this idea. The chef goes in to it with the idea that they're going to show people how to make good food with what they have that they can afford.
Then when they've kinda done all they can with that in a season or two it starts to go off the rails.
Then eventually you have Alton Brown lowering an entire turkey in to a boiling 25 gallon pot with a ladder and a pully system in the back yard of his studio house.
Because these shows are entertainment first, cooking second.
There are like nine seasons of a show called Struggle Meals.
Cool will check it out
Surprised nobody's mentioning Joshua Weissman's "but cheaper" series. You get the impression he's a little into himself, but the recipes are solid.
I've wanted to do this in conjunction with Aldi using only aldi ingredients for a long time now. I've always wanted to make a rehearsal video and send it to them. Think they'd go for it?
In Germany, there's a cookbook written by someone who only used Aldi ingredients. It's called "Aldi dente" and focuses on cheap and delicious meals. It's a couple of years old by now so Idk if it'd still works but might be worth looking at.
Edit: it's from 1996, I'm getting old
Cooking shows are funded by product placement and advertising deals. You can probably figure out the rest.
Emmymade on YouTube has a series on depression era and similar recipes. Not all winners, but its a decent sized series on that theme
Omg, thank you! TIL. Wonderful videos!
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Not the same, but Restaurant Impossible would show making restaurant quality meals and the actual costs associated. Puts into perspective how much you can do if you budget ingredients
Every match ends with an 8 way tie of
Welp, it’s edible! You Win
Unless your local prices are seriously outrageous, most traditional cuisine from anywhere will fit that bill. At least the stuff I make comfortably stays below that number. If anything how would a home-cooked meal even get close to $10 per meal?
Grocery prices in my city are kinda nuts if you want to add fish, chicken, beef or pork to your meal. A salmon filet is easily over $16/400g, before any other ingredients.
well no, you kinda need access to the ingredients for that cuisine.. Like, nordic (and even a lot of central european) grocery stores don't just have galangal or whatever. Plus if they do it's gonna be horribly expensive, since it's imported.
True, I guess the implication is more "traditional cuisine that can be made and/or substituted with local ingredients." It also helps that a lot of the unique regional stuff (like galangal) is spices that can be done without in a pinch. Not to lessen the importance of using the right spices, but even in the worst case virtually everything will taste good with appropriate use of salt, black pepper and (sometimes) vinegar.
if you know what you're looking for and ~~now~~ know how to cook.
one problem i see/have with cookbooks on traditional cuisine is that a lot of the better one focus on traditional sunday roast style fancy recipes (schweinebraten mit kraut und knödeln), and while good they are not cheap. what is more difficult to find is the saisonal poor mans cuisine. except maybe cucina povera from Italy.
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Mythical Kitchen is that, a lot of the time. When they actually fucking cook anymore, anyway. I am not a fan of the talk show type shit they started doing; I want 7/11 junk food turned into gourmet dining, damn it!
But a lot of home chefs on YouTube are exactly what you're looking for.
Last Meals is a great interview show.... But i dislike their podcast food talk show
The Marvin Show is your poor man's cooking show. Hosted by one time Big Brother participant Marvin Latimer. It's hard to put to words or describe the show so I just linked a memorable episode. This was on broadcast TV at some point. Green screen doorway and all.
Another poor man's cooking show was Masaokis. He had a poor grasp on food in general and his genre is more "cooking with hoarders" with a heavy splash of harebrained philosophy. One video is about hot dogs and peaches. I haven't watched the video in a long time but I can still remember the sound he made after tasting the concoction of hot dogs blended in peach juice. He tried to cook a steak on the rim of his toilet by burning paper. He thought the shell of an egg was the egg whites. He made a smoothie with whole moldy peaches and unpeeled oranges and who knows what else.
I believe his whole mythology was that he filmed in an apartment he would go to when he was on a bender. I think I remember seeing a much ~~nicer~~ less trashed apartment in one video. It has been a long time but I remember seeing a ton of books on a shelf with all their spines placed inward. The conditions he cooked in are not for the faint of heart. I can think of at least 2 fires starting from all the shit on his stove.
Masaokis was insane! I found him when looking for ways to grill a steak without a grill. The surprising part was that setting a steak on a toilet bowl rim was part of the process.
Because no one watches cooking shows anymore.
And now you can know why... As we're all broke.
There's surely got to be something like this on YouTube
There's plenty. OP is probably just thinking about mainstream cooking shows.
I did a bid upstate....well here downstate. And one of the best meals I had was top ramen and crunched up flamin cheetos. But doesn't feel the same when making it now.
Huh, despite eating both extremely rarely, I'd try that! Don't laugh, but do you have any tips? Just cook Top Ramen and add Flaming Hot Cheetos to it, or are there measurements or techniques I should aim for?
The jail technique is to crush both, throw them in a bag with optional pickles, sausage, whatever the vending machine has. Dump in just enough very hot water to soak everything, then knead it a bit until it forms kind of a loaf.
There are a number of cooks who did that, even as series or cook books. Low budget cooking or student cooking are the terms to look out for.
If you want low budget cooking, you can also look into food prepping and freezing, as large batch cooking is often a very money-conscious idea. I often cook large batches of some meals, usually 12-15 liters. Portion it off as needed and freeze it. One day of work when you've got the time and the ingredients are on sale, and countless hours saved on everyday cooking.
Plug for BeyondFoodMarket
He’s got a lot of short videos where he makes something for $10 or less (his lowest was $2 if I remember right).
Dollar Tree Dinners on FB
In Sweden (where food is generally more expensive than in the US) we have several options. One food blogger launched a series called ”Portionen under tian” (Meal portion under 10 SEK/$1) which got so popular that she got to write several recipe books from it. We (or at least the people I hang around with) also use thrifty options like “Karma” and “Too good to go” which can stretch healthy meals for a family of three - four for almost a whole week (given that the kids eat lunch at school) for under 300 SEK/$30, and not be the same food every day.
Others in this thread have commented that the very cooking shows you’re asking about already exist.
Where could you even find healthy ingredients for under $10 that will last a few days?
It can't be beans and rice again, all the time.
It can't be beans and rice again
Ok... Onions and potatoes it is. 🤷♂️
Okay I don't live in America but I routinely make healthy meals for the local equivalent of under 5 bucks, which should be equivalent to about 10 in America according to a quick Google. And for the record I mean proper meals, not beans and rice. For example Walmart sells a pound of lentils online for two bucks, an onion for about one buck and half a dozen carrots (actual carrots, not baby carrots) for less than three bucks, or about 50 cents per carrot. A pound of lentils, an onion and a carrot will make enough lentil soup for five days*, or about a $0.75 per dinner. For the full experience you can add half a disk of pita bread for $0.5 per meal, or you can substitute with tortillas for less than 15 cents per meal. We're still a full order of magnitude below the ten bucks limit. And this isn't poverty food; where I'm from people actually eat this because they want to. It's not labor-intensive either, but it does need a food processor (cheapest I could find was 6 bucks on Amazon, but I didn't look very hard).
Point being: Maybe I'm missing something, but even with recent price increases there's plenty of good food one could have without getting any close to the 10 bucks limit.
*There's no need to make the five days' worth all at once; lentils will last for months outside the fridge.
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