I want this thread to serve as a place we can share some sources, websites that we can use to save money and/or get hard-to-find ingredients.Pic related: this bundle of dried chillies costs £16.66 on Amazon, and it's the cheapest bundle by far on the first few pages (pricier bundles don't even have the 10g of chilli/lime seasoning thingery). I splurge on food compared to most but damn near £17 for less than 1lb of ingredients is a bit steep for me. Anyone know of cheaper alternatives?I offer up Buy Whole Foods Online. If you want nuts/seeds, lentils/legumes, grains, shit like that in bulk go there. They have good prices and you earn some credits for every item you buy. They have weekly offers going on too, this week you get a free 1kg of cashews if you spend £50. Been buying from them for like 5 years now, good little place to stock up on stuff.I would have recommended Red Rickshaw but they came under new management last year and kind of went to shit.But yeah have at it, if you know something say something. Especially if they sell a variety of dried chillies
>>21093385What the fuck are you woffling on about tossbag spending £16 on chillies is mental and buying overpriced whole foods like some fudge packing American wanker I suggest you try Asda and Lidl like a normal person not some posh cunt who thinks he is special for buying expensive foreign shite.
>>21093395
>>21093385I live in the rural West Country, so it's difficult for me also but every few months, I go to visit my Brother in Bristol, but they have lots of little mini-mart places full of exotic stuff, that's when I stock up with lots of dried and packet foods.I admit that I can't find as many South American chillies as perhaps you can find online but I do OK with Birds-eyes, Scotch Bonnets and I have found some hot chillies which taste of chocolate?? Maybe a consideration?
>>21093476I should also mention that my Brother lives in an Asian area of Bristol (we are not Asian but he had good reason to buy his house there - another story) so I mostly go there, I've been to the other side of the city for Caribbean stuff but I never felt safe there! These mini-marts are quite cheap too.
>>21093476I'm NE, we don't really have much like that here, next time I'm in Newcastle Ill have to look around for some places like that. We're kind of in chilli poverty up here, supermarkets sometimes have birds-eye chillies but usually its just non-descript generic chillies. Even greengrocers round here never seem to have anything beyond the odd jalapeño. I grow some food myself so during the summer I can get some jalapeños, habeneros, serranos etc. I hear these Mexican dried chillies have very distinct flavours and applications (including chocolatey notes like you mentioned) so I might just have to start smoking and drying shit that I've grown
>>21093520>I grow some food myself so during the summer I can get some jalapeños, habeneros, serranos etc.I have a large South Facing window and I have grown my own Chillies too, same sort of varieties as you but could I get to grow my own Scotch Bonnets or Ghost Peppers . . . Nah! I only managed a couple of fruits per plant, I also had a big problem with Aphids. It cheesed me off, maybe I will try another year.
>>21093528Growing stuff is so based man, I do it mostly for cost-effective things like herbs, garlic, and shallots since you can easily grow more than you need and save money at the same time but you can also grow 'exotic' shit that you can't find in Asda like certain chillies and daikon radish and stuff
>>21093528ghost peppers have an enormously long growing season
>>21093617Yeah that's fine by me, they're a bit caliente for my palate
>>21093385Can anyone recommend a good place for degenerate alcoholics to buy in bulk?
>>21093395Lmao, this is my favourite poster on /ck/. I don't know whether you're doing it unironically, but it's genuinely a good impression of a working class northerner who somehow found his way onto 4chan.
>>21093736Lad said "woffling" kek
>>21093385Dude dried chilis are so cheap in the US, any of these bags would be like three dollars lmao. Mexican is not good enough to be worth spending 20 dollars on fucking dried peppers
>>21093824I do think it's definitely not worth it but I am still curious and I wouldn't mind experimenting with them one day, these would be completely new ingredients to me. I've been to the USA several times and fuck you lot have it good over there
These are $2.49 a pack, and probably the most popular brand for dried chilis in the USA. I don't know if you can get them in the UK but they are pretty consistant. I use them for steak chili.
>>21093385strangely the asian shop in my nearest town has a small mexican section in it, and its a lot cheaper than that. think it's about 3 quid for a bag of dried chillies
>>21093926>don't know if you can get them in the UKNot in my corner of the UK you can't. You're a lucky bastard though, there are a lot of items over there that are everyday ingredients that would be classed as exotic here. >>21093946Yeah at this rate it's looking like I'll have to nose around Newcastle or maybe Durham and try to find a place that specialises in foreign stuff. I can get dried TRS brand chillies for cheap but again it's non-descript generic chillies, I'm looking to buy specific varieties and explore the (alledged) different notes between them all and fine-tune a chilli con carne recipe and a salsa etc
You can get dried, crushed arbol and ancho chilli's from tescos for about a quid for the little jars.
>>21093385That's as good as it gets mate, in terms of chillies. Impossible otherwise. I wanted to do a proper chilli (I actually got the recipe from here) and decided I had to pay through the nose to do so. Mexican food is such a niche over here. I used Mexgrocer, they had some deals, but it was negligible difference overall. It gave me about 3 separate chilli dinners, which I suppose isn't the worst
