Takeaway vs Fakeaway: What Your Favourite Menu Items Really Cost to Make at Home

We spend most of our time here looking at menus and prices, so we notice when things creep up. And they have: once you add delivery fees and a service charge, a fairly ordinary order for two can now land somewhere between £25 and £35. That is fine as a treat. As a habit, it quietly becomes one of the biggest lines on your food budget.

This guide is not about giving up takeaways. It is about knowing the numbers, because once you see what your favourite menu items cost to make at home, you can decide when a takeaway is worth it and when a “fakeaway” will do the same job for a fraction of the price.

How the maths works

A restaurant price has to cover rent, staff, packaging and margin, which is fair enough. Your home version only has to cover ingredients. The gap is biggest on dishes built around cheap pantry staples such as rice, dried beans and lentils, flour and spices, because those cost pennies per portion when bought sensibly. Dishes built around large amounts of fresh meat or fish still save you money at home, just less dramatically.

All prices below are typical UK figures at the time of writing, rounded for simplicity. Yours will vary a little by region and supermarket, but the gaps will not.

Katsu chicken curry

Ordered in, a katsu curry with rice tends to sit around £12 to £14. At home, a chicken thigh, a portion of rice and a curry sauce made from stock, flour, curry powder and a spoonful of honey comes in at roughly £3 to £3.50 a portion. The sauce freezes well, so it pays to make four portions at once.

Burrito bowl

A standard burrito bowl is around £9 to £11 on most delivery apps. The home version is rice, black beans, sweetcorn, salsa and a squeeze of lime. Cooked from dried, the beans work out at around 30 to 40 pence per portion, and the whole bowl lands near £2.50.

Peri-peri chicken wrap

Somewhere between £8 and £10 with sides, depending on where you order. At home, chicken thighs marinated overnight in paprika, garlic, oregano, chilli and lemon, then grilled and folded into a wrap with slaw, cost around £2.80 a portion. The marinade is nothing more than a well-stocked spice rack.

Lentil dal with rice

The biggest gap of all. A dal with rice and sides is easily £9 to £12 delivered, yet red lentils are among the cheapest foods you can buy. With onion, garlic, spices and rice, a generous portion can cost as little as £1.50, and it reheats better than almost anything else you can batch cook.

Where the savings actually come from

Here is the part most fakeaway guides skip: the per-portion prices above assume you are not buying tiny supermarket jars and packets. A 40g jar of a single spice can cost more than 100g of the same spice bought in a larger bag, and small packets of rice, lentils and flour carry the same markup.

The fix is to buy your pantry staples in larger formats from a wholefood retailer rather than picking up small packs on each shop. Whole Food Earth, a UK online wholefood grocer with more than 3,600 organic lines, sells rice, pulses, flours and spices in kilo-size bags at wholesale-style prices, with free UK mainland delivery over £35. Bought that way, the rice and lentils in the dishes above genuinely do cost pennies per portion, and a one-off order covers months of fakeaways.

Making it stick

Three habits keep the numbers on your side. First, batch cook the sauces and the pulses, because the second portion takes no extra effort. Second, build a small working spice rack of eight to ten spices rather than buying one jar per recipe. Third, keep takeaways for the dishes that are hard to do at home, and let the easy wins come from your own kitchen.

Swap just two delivered orders a month for home versions and you are keeping roughly £40 to £50 in your pocket every month, which is over £500 a year. Next time you are browsing menu prices on here, run the numbers on the home version too. Some nights the delivery is worth every penny. A lot of nights, the fakeaway wins.