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.
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.
wtf is a hamburger helper and how is it helping me making hamburgers
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 probably helps to understand ‘hamburger’ in this sense is very low quality minced/ground beef*
*might be ‘beef’
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’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
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.