As cool as some of the foods you see in your favorite shows, movies, or video games may be, there's usually a reason why you haven’t seen anything like it in real life.
- With some ingredients, such as puff pastry in the first episode he did on Mad Men, Andrew finds that as cool as it might be to make them homemade, the process is so time-consuming that it would be much easier to just pick them up at a store.
- Similarly, Andrew bluntly points out in "Szechuan Sauce Revisited" that you could just go and buy Chicken McNuggets instead of making them at home.
- Most of the Movie Theater Popcorn & Raisinets from Whiplash episode ends up this, with Andrew making chocolate covered raisins and cranberries. However, he makes them with Dark Chocolate (which he prefers), painstakingly coating each individually. The results turn out not to work when mixed with the popcorn as the Dark Chocolate clashes with the buttery flavor of the popcorn, making the store-bought chocolate raisins (covered in Milk Chocolate) a better choice.
- In the "Lemon Pepper Wet from Atlanta'', he makes his own Lemon Pepper seasoning, while admitting from upfront that it's a waste of time and effort and that the viewer should just buy readily available commercial Lemon Pepper seasoning.
- Again with Créme de la Créme á la Edgar he pretty much tells the viewer to just go out and buy some damn Ritz crackers.
- Bubble Bass' memetic order at the Krusty Krab ends up becoming a Dagwood Sandwich, borderline impossible to stack up properly since it's less of a burger and more of the line of something Shaggy and Scooby would try to create.
- He makes homemade "instant" Macaroni and Cheese
from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - His Metaphorgotten monologue when hand-pulling the noodles for Secret Ingredient Soup is an extended lampshading of this.
- Pointedly lampshaded aversion in the Basics episode on baklava, in which he uses frozen phyllo dough:Next up, we gotta talk phyllo dough, and if you were expecting me to make my own, you must be thinking this is Binging and not Basics.
- The "Bachelor Chow" from Futurama he makes is freeze-dried boeuf bourguignon. It tastes perfect, but unless you have a massively expensive freeze dryer lying around, you should probably just make the boeuf bourguignon and skip the freeze drying. Actually, even if you do have a freeze dryer, you should probably skip that unless you're absolutely dying to do the process.
- His Botched By Babish video on cacio e pepe showcases an old-school recipe for said pasta dish. While traditional, it ends up being extremely impractical (requiring more than five attempts to figure out the correct temperatures to mix the ingredients at) and produces a more harshly-flavoured dish. Andrew repeatedly notes that adding fat to the recipe, while less traditional, makes it much easier and tastier.
- His 2 Million Subscriber Special has him cook the Every-Meat Burrito using every type of meat he could buy from standard beef to rattlesnake. Awesome in concept? Absolutely. Easy to make and good to the taste? God no. Every single different kind of meat in the burrito requires its own cooking methods, temperature, and time, so trying to make the Every-Meat Burrito in anything resembling a realistic timeframe is going to result in half or more of the different meats being either over-or-undercooked.
- Jake's Perfect Sandwich. First, sous vide a steak, which isn't exactly difficult (it's cooking it in temperature controlled water in a vacuum-sealed bag), but is both time consuming and is usually done with specialized equipment. Jake does it in a random pot over an open burner, so good luck doing it that way (not to mention he "sealed" the plastic bag by sucking the air out of it with his mouth). Then, you debone your poultry of choice to stand in for your "bird from the window".note Tears for salt are optional, but Andrew is a perfectionist. After that, you take an entire loaf of bread and toast it with a blowtorch, which is going to take a LONG time, which Andrew did enjoy but does recommend just using the oven. Then of course we get to the lobster soul, which is impossible to recreate due to a number of reasons. Andrew assumes that meant giving the sandwich a light lobster flavor, so he went with lobster aioli instead. The remaining ingredients are all relatively normal things like pickles, tomatoes, and bacon, but it's still a lot more stuff you've got to pile on. The result was worthy of the name and Jake's desperation to get it back from Magic Man, but good luck taking a bite out of the Dagwood Sandwich without it falling apart. In the end, Andrew cut off a thin segment of the sandwich to try it for the camera, then saved the rest for dinner later that night, picking it apart and eating it like a four-course meal instead.
- Andrew's partner Alvin has the Cosmic Tower Burger. You're stating off with basically making a giant loaf of bread for the bun, then the total of 12 pounds of ground beef to make the 6 patties, each roughly the size of a baking tray in order to actually fill out the enormous bun. The other ingredients aren't any smaller in scale either, as you're going to be chopping a whole lot of onions and tomatoes, a couple heads of lettuce and a couple dozen slices of cheese as it takes 6 or so to actually cover each patty. All told you're probably looking at the better part of a day to make the thing, but at least when it was done it took ten people to even put a dent in it. And, of course, it's not even close to possible to actually eat it like a burger in the end.
- Its predecessor, the Mega Beef Bowl, is nothing to sneeze at either. Even just the amount of ingredients needed make it a huge undertaking. At least it's something you can actually take a bite of in real life. Needless to say, you're definitely going to need understanding to accept it as a whole, knowledge to set the proper pace, courage to attack the mountain of meat, and dedication to keep on eating.
