Sorry myself, but that is somewhat offensive. Just because something takes forever doesn’t necesarily make it better. YOU may like your way best, but there are many ways to do things.
I agree with you.
I was gonna say, I’m not much of a sweets person, but from-scratch cake isn’t much more difficult and the results are way better than cakes mixes.
For me, and I’ve mentioned this in another thread, and I’ve made it more than once when I had to due to availability of ingredients, is pumpkin pie. The canned purée is just as good as using fresh pumpkin, to me, and not worth the extra effort. Though, as I also said in that thread, I’d rather make it from fresh sweet potatoes.
Singapore noodles.
My ex-wife could make terrific Singapore noodles. They were delicious! At some point after she left, I decided to make them myself. I found her recipe, and set out to make them.
Hm. I need to get a few ingredients, mostly perishables, but not all. Okay, I got them.
Then, I set about cooking everything. No real problem there, but as things went along, I began to realize just how much this dish made. And then I remembered that my ex’s recipe was for 4 to 6 people, and we only had it when we had friends over.
Well, my Singapore noodles were just as good as hers, but once I had finished my meal, I had plenty left over. It’s not the type of dish you can freeze for later, or keep under any circumstances really, so after leftovers the next day, most of it went in the trash. And plenty of ingredients left over also, none of which I would typically buy and few of which I had any idea about what to do with going forward. Well, the curry powder adds a little zip to a lot of things, I guess. But the rest—at least those that were not perishable, such as the rice vermicelli—still sit in the cupboard, having been used only once.
Nowadays, I just find it easier to get an order of Singapore noodles from a local Chinese restaurant.
Agreed with @Whack-a-Mole. For example, I loved the homemade sausage. But if I want something similar taste wise, I could buy pre-ground duroc pork, roast and chop the Hatch chiles, chop the garlic, scallions and cilantro, add the salt and cumin, and carefully (so it doesn’t get too hot) hand mix it before chilling.
Once done, I can and do form it into patties (generally breakfast sausage size, but I’ve done it as a burger) and cook it in a skillet.
A fraction of the work of grinding it all myself, stuffing it into casings, and then cleaning all the resulting mess - but I’d get 90% of the flavor with maybe 10% of the work.
Sure, I miss the extra fun of an actual sausage, especially the lovely sensation of your teeth breaking the casing, but that savings in time talks.
(incidentally, the small sized patties in a cast iron skillet are amazing with homemade steamed buns but store bao buns are still great with just a bit of hoisin either way - and if cooked into crumbles work nicely with glass noodles, rice noodles or even udon)
???
I’ve made meatballs from Ikea’s recipe and I don’t recall any “sub-recipes”. Make meatballs, make gravy, add A to B. It took maybe 45 minutes from start to finish.
Oh, that reminds me of another, cranberry jelly. I made it from scratch once, boiling cranberries with sugar. What an incredible mess that made as the boiling jelly spattered around the pot. And it was very good. But… wow, it tasted and awful lot like ocean spray whole berry cranberry sauce. And everyone likes the smooth canned jelly better.
I could do it in a larger pot and it wouldn’t be a crazy amount of work. Less than the effort i put into red current jelly. But my red current jelly is SOoo much better than anything i can buy. And the cranberry sauce? Really, it tasted remarkably like ocean spray.
(I’ve bought store brands. Ocean spray brand is better, with a brighter, fresher, more cranberry-y flavor.)
I’m not going to make pumpkin pie from scratch again, either. But i don’t really like pumpkin pie, i just make it for relatives who like it. And they seem completely satisfied by what i make with canned pumpkin. I’m willing to believe that someone who really likes pumpkin pie would find it worth cooking some special tasty pumpkins to make the pie.
Maybe. But it was a lot more work, and no better. Of course, IMHO the buttercream frosting is what makes the cake good.
My Dad made our cranberry sauce for Christmas and Thanksgiving turkeys. Not cranberry jelly, but much as you describe, he started with boiling cranberries with sugar, and made the sauce from there.
Dad was a really good cook, while my Mom wasn’t, so Dad looked after a lot of “important special occasion” meals. Sadly most of Dad’s recipes, including the one for cranberry sauce, were in his head, and were never written down, so I cannot replicate his cranberry sauce.
It tastes fresher and richer doesn’t have that preservative tang. And it’s maybe 5-10 more minutes of effort. But hey, it works for you. And i agree that cake mixes aren’t too bad.
I’ve made Pollo Borracho, from a cookbook by Zarela Martinez (you may have heard of her son, celebrity chef Aaron Sanchez).
I used to work / live a few blocks from her restaurant in Manhattan, in the 1990s, and that was my favorite dish there. So when I found the cookbook, I eagerly tried that dish.
It tasted NOTHING like what the restaurant served.
Assuming I’d done something wrong, I tried it again. Nope. And it was a metric shit-ton of work, too. I’m still bitter.
I agree 100% on both canned frosting and that mix cakes are perfectly acceptable. You can doctor up the mixes (in fact there’s a cookbook, The Cake Mix Doctor, dealing with doing just that).
On the frosting: Unless you are doing a fancy meringue buttercream, which to be fair DOES involve more work (but… worth it), a basic buttercream just involves sugar, butter, flavoring and an electric mixer. I vented about this very topic in the “what are you snobbish about” thread fairly recently.
Also agree on puff pastry. I’ve never made it from scratch because it looks like too much work. My daughter didn’t know it was too hard, so she went ahead and did it! But the store bought is perfectly fine.
Croissants, baklava (even with store-bought puff pastry), eclairs.
They all came out well, but they need to be enjoyed within a few days, and the two of us can’t eat so much.
If I did do croissants again, I think the dough can be frozen at some point.
Now that it’s possible for me to buy canned pumpkin, I’ll use canned. But I do make some pumpkin pies from scratch as well. It’s not a big difference, but it’s fun to do.
I tried to make bagels once.
The bakery price for a single had gotten way more expensive than what I calculated the price of flour, etc to be so I looked up a recipe and tried to make my own.
- Making good bagels apparently takes an 25 hour rise/ferment.
- Making good bagels requires lye.
- Making good bagels requires a boil(in the aforementioned lye) then a bake.
- I, and you, don’t have a pot capable of boiling more that 3 bagels at a time, because they float
- Homemade bagels go stale and ‘meh’ quickly. Freezing kind of works, but the ‘meh’ heads toward ‘ehhh’ when thawed.
- Making good bagels seems to take more than 0 experience.
After many, many hours and curses to make 6 shitty bagels, I understood the economy we where operating in.
My favorite cranberry sauce is one that Susan Stamberg (of NPR fame) shared. Her grandma made it and it is quick, easy, and deceptively delicious. Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish.
The first time we made it I thought we’d be throwing it out. Cranberries, onions, sour cream, horseradish blended together and frozen, never cooked?. Sounds mad, but amazing.
My MIL made a raw cranberry relish with cranberries and orange and maybe some other stuff. It was very tasty. But not as tasty as the canned jelly. 
It was different, and I’d make it if someone wanted it. I think we have the recipe.
I made some amazing chile rellenos a few months ago. But the roasting and peeling of chiles, grating of a buttload of cheese, whipping up egg whites, stuffing and fastening the chiles closed, dipping them in eggy coating and frying them in deep peanut oil, and making the accompanying spicy tomato sauce, exhausted me. I was almost too tired to enjoy the dish when we sat down to eat it.
From now on, I’ll let the abuela at our favorite Mexican restaurant do all the work.
I’ve made baklava quite a few times and thought it was challenging and fun.
The thing I wouldn’t do again is brine a turkey. I saw no benefit to that, and the downside is that the drippings are too salty to use.
Oh, and bagels. Just not worth the time and effort.
Ditto on brining a turkey and on making bagels. But i wouldn’t clarify either of those as successful. The turkey ended up with a rubbery skin and overly salty drippings, and the bagels just weren’t as good as what i can buy.
I made puff pastry with a friend, once. As a shared experience with a friend, it was fun. And the pastry was delicious. But I’ll still to store-bought for cooking by myself.
I just use a spatter guard for that kind of stuff. I haven’t made it in many, many years, probably the last time was when I made pumpkin pie from scratch while living abroad, but it is (IMHO) so much better than the canned jelly stuff. I could never stand that style of cranberry jelly, always preferring the canned whole fruit version if I’m going with cans. In my family, my brother is the only one who likes the smooth canned jelly.
I bought everything I needed to deep fry a turkey It came out absolutely delicious. The only problem was that an oven roasted turkey also comes out absolutely delicious and I don’t have to deal with gallons of cooking oil afterwards.
I made five bagels from scratch. It was an interesting experience that I think everyone should try, but I honestly prefer good store bought bagels.