Recipes under $1 a serving
The cheapest ways to cook with what’s in season this week — every one under a dollar per serving.
5431 recipes
A dollar a serving is a genuinely low bar, and hitting it usually comes down to the same handful of decisions: build the meal on a cheap staple, let a small amount of an expensive ingredient do the flavouring rather than the filling, and take whatever produce happens to be at its seasonal low that week.
Every cost here is recalculated from the current USDA advertised prices, so this list changes shape week to week. A recipe that misses the cutoff in February can land on it in August when its main vegetable comes into season. That is the point of pricing recipes against live data rather than against a number someone typed in once.
Two caveats worth knowing. Costs marked with a tilde include at least one ingredient we could not price precisely and had to estimate. And the price is per serving as the source recipe defines a serving, which is not always as much food as you would actually eat.
- Cucumber lime jalapeno granita for oystersRecipe by RecipeTin Eats~$0.10 / serving 3 in-season
- PopoversRecipe by Love & Lemons~$0.10 / serving 0 in-season
- Chewy Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Breakfast CookieRecipe by Skinnytaste~$0.11 / serving 1 in-season
- Homemade Lemon CurdRecipe by Budget Bytes~$0.12 / serving 0 in-season
- Buckwheat and Spelt CrêpesRecipe by Cookie + Kate~$0.13 / serving 0 in-season
- Carrot Baby FoodRecipe by Eating Bird Food~$0.16 / serving 1 in-season
- PopoversRecipe by Budget Bytes~$0.16 / serving 0 in-season
- Roasted BeetsRecipe by Spend With Pennies~$0.17 / serving 1 in-season
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Look through the list and the same structure appears again and again: a cheap staple carrying the volume, a small amount of something expensive doing the flavouring, and a vegetable that happened to be at its seasonal low. Rice, pasta, potatoes, and dried beans are between two and eight cents a serving, which means they are effectively free relative to everything else on the plate. Almost nothing gets under a dollar without one of them.
The second pattern is that the protein is present but not central. A dollar a serving does not buy four ounces of beef, but it comfortably buys an egg, or a quarter cup of dried beans, or a modest amount of chicken thigh stretched through a dish rather than served as a piece. That is not a compromise so much as how most of the world has always cooked; the plate built around a large portion of meat is a recent and expensive arrangement.
The trap at this price point is thin food. A meal that is cheap and unsatisfying gets replaced by something else two hours later, which is not a saving. Fat and acid are what stop that happening, and both are cheap — a spoonful of oil and a squeeze of something sharp cost a few cents and do more for a dish than another ingredient would.
If a recipe here looks too cheap to be a real meal, check the serving count on the source. Our cost is per serving as the source defines it, and some sources define it optimistically.
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