It Cost $1500 to Make This Sandwich Completely from Scratch

A lot of trendy restaurants boast meals that are made "completely from scratch.” Unless they boiled down the ocean water themselves and nearly got arrested trying to take the salt through customs, they got nothing on this guy.

As part of his “How to Make Everything” series, YouTuber Andy George set off on a quest to discover what really goes into building a sandwich made 100 percent from scratch. The sandwich and all its ingredients ended up costing $1,554 and took 6 months to make. You’d think he’d go with a simple recipe, like maybe a BLT without the B, but the final product included chicken, cheese, lettuce, onion, pickles, tomatoes, and mayonnaise, which he curdled, slaughtered, and harvested by hand. 

In addition to growing the vegetables and milking a cow, he also went out of his way to collect honey and forage for greens. Because he wasn’t using preservatives, the peak freshness of all his ingredients needed to coincide perfectly. This proved to be a challenge, with the wheat for the bread taking longer to grow than he had anticipated, throwing off the whole schedule.

He calculated the price by adding his out-of-pocket expenses, which totaled $542, with the amount he would pay himself for the 140 hours of labor he invested, $1011, based on federal minimum wage. The project makes you appreciate the amount of work a small army of people complete just to get lunch on your plate. It also shows that “made from scratch” isn’t always the gold standard for taste—after biting into his $1500 sandwich, George described it as “not bad.”