Burgers. Mine are cheaper and better than any of the burger places, whether we’re talking MickeyD’s (a little cheaper and a lot better) or Five Guys (a little better and a lot cheaper).
And the difference gets even bigger when you toss in the time cost of driving somewhere to eat burgers. I’ll have a restaurant burger if I’m out and about already when I get hungry, but not if I’m sitting at home.
We can and do make better/cheaper: Pie crust. Plain yogurt. Bagels. Granola. Chicken and beef broth. Artisan breads.
I find it harder to buy into better baked sweet goods at home, generically, because at home we use real butter, nice chocolate, etc.
I’m trying to think of non-food items. I would have said woolen mittens a while back, but wool has gotten so expensive I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
Risotto. I can feed four hungry people a filling plate of freshly made (not par cooked and left to finish later like even restaurants at the Gordon Ramsey level do) risotto with chicken and a vegetable (like peas or broccoli) for less than half the cost of one serving at a moderately priced restaurant.
And pizza. I think even the super simple no knead recipe on youtube by Jim Lahey will be better than what most people who don’t live in New York City or New Haven will get from their local pizza shop. (Tip: Don’t go nuts on the topping; keep it simple and minimal.)
I don’t make hundreds of dollars an hour, but even still, my wife and I have a shortage of free time and a surplus of money. If we could magically transmute money into time, it would seriously improve our lives.
But that is why we pay a cleaning lady to come in once every two weeks. I could do that stuff myself, and save a few thousand a year. But we need the time more than we need the money. So if I can pay someone a reasonable amount of money to do a job for me that needs doing (e.g. painting a room), and they’ll do it well enough to suit me, I’ll open my checkbook.
I’ll do for myself the things where (a) I can do them better, and (b) where that degree of ‘better’ makes a difference in my life. For instance, I can make better bookshelves and cabinets than I can buy in a store, because they fit the space we have, and they fit the stuff we want to put in them. But I’ll pay someone to paint a room, because even if I could do it marginally better, the difference isn’t worth the time.
The ones I can think of offhand are mostly food items: granola, stock and/or soup of all kinds, many baked goods. The granola in particular I make from scratch because most commercial granola has ingredients that Tom Scud isn’t supposed to eat. And it offends my sensibilities now to get an inferior boxed product for probably an order of magnitude greater cost. Besides, I have yet to find commercially made granola with cardamom and coconut, which are a delicious combination.
Stock? These days I’ve been making it with leftover vegetable scraps that I keep in a Ziploc bag in the freezer, along with the occasional chicken carcass, until I have enough for a batch of stock. Miles better than anything I can buy, and basically free because the ingredients would go in the trash otherwise. Just throw it in the Crock-Pot with some water, a few peppercorns, and a bay leaf, and Bob’s your uncle.
Actually I have a loaf of whole wheat/rye sourdough in the oven right now. It’s a 2 lb. loaf that will cost pennies (whatever the cost of 3.5 cups of flour and 2t of salt is). A loaf like that would probably cost $5 around here. It only takes a few minutes of active prep time, but the best part is that I can have warm fresh bread without leaving the house in the morning. Are there professional bakeries that make better bread? Sure, but they aren’t close to home and people would look at me funny if I went in my pajamas. Same for muffins, etc.: most commercial ones have far too much sugar for my taste.
Like pulykamell, I actually enjoy cooking, so as long as I have the spare time, I don’t consider my time to be a cost. For example, the bread in the oven is being tended while I hang out here and drink a cup of coffee in my pajamas.
I understand the economics of it. I just don’t agree, at least with regards to my personal time, I guess, but that’s because I have a surplus of free time, I suppose. Anyhow, another thread…
As for beer, most homebrews I’ve actually preferred to most anything priced up to about a buck to a buck fifty a bottle at the store. It’s rare that I’ll pass up a homebrew even for my favorite cheap beer of choice, Old Style. It has to be a pretty shitty homebrew for that to happen, and most people (at least the ones I know) make homebrews that are far from what I would call shitty. But, of course, it depends on your tastes. I totally can believe that someone never had a homebrew that they liked.
I’ve rarely had homemade ice cream, but my brother has made some (and I also worked at a restaurant that made it in house), and it’s far better than bottom-shelf ice cream. Like not even close. I mean, first, it tastes like cream. I can feel my arteries hardening as I eat it, but real homemade ice cream made with loads of cream and sugar and fresh vanilla pods is just ungodly good. (And I generally am not an ice cream eater.)
No. Commercial products have division of labor and economies of scale.
It seems to me it used to be true of a lot more things than it is now, even factoring the value of my time. I used to occasionally make my own wooden furniture and sew my own clothes. Now the materials are more expensive, my time is worth more, and the store-bought alternatives are cheaper.
I think it’s still true of a lot of foods:
Sausage is my top choice for cheaper and better, provided I wait until the right kind of meat is on sale. Store-bought is too greasy and too salty, and often not seasoned to my taste. Bread from my bread machine is another one, with the caveat that homemade is only better if it’s eaten within about 16 to 24 hours after baking. I used to make bread by hand, but mixing, shaping, and cleanup takes so much time that I doubt it’s worth it. Jam is fairly cheap and easy to make (depending on how much you pay for fruit) and store-bought is usually too sweet for me.
When it comes to ready-to-eat meals, the analysis is complicated. If you make it yourself you have to factor in the value of your time as well as the ingredients and the gas or electric to cook it. But if you go to a restaurant, you should factor in the cost to travel there and the value of your time driving and the time spent waiting to be served. (Except for one sub-par pizza place, no restaurant delivers to my rural area.) With those considerations in mind I think my homemade pizza and soups qualify, as do some of my Asian recipes.
Also, I find that with my soil and climate conditions, it makes sense to grow some garden produce myself (strawberries and tomatoes especially), but other crops just aren’t worth it (potatoes, corn, cabbage, carrots, etc.).
Bread is cheaper at home. Is it better? Well, you can’t buy the multi-grain bread I make, so the question can’t be answered.
But the real winner is my chocolate truffles. I have costed them carefully and 30 truffles cost $10-11, depending on what liqueur I put in, compared to $1.50 a piece for commercial ones. And they are certainly better.
I have made dirt cheap and delicious dog biscuits at home a few times with my “As Seen on TV” pup biscuit maker (basically a waffle iron that makes four bone-shaped biscuits at a time).
The ingredients are pretty simple and inexpensive, I’ve made a variety of flavors and my dogs go bonkers for the treats.
So, home biscuit making is cheaper and healthier than, say, a box of Milkbones is. However, in terms of labor they are far more expensive - it takes me two hours to make 30 biscuits.
Oh, good point on that one. There’s a bunch of herbs I grow every year because they’re stupid expensive at the grocery store, or they are simply impossible to find. Basil is the biggest one. I can rarely find it in bulk, so a handful of leaves ends up costing like $3 at the store in one of those herb clamshells. Meanwhile, if I grow it myself, I am out my ears in basil at the end of the year for a very minimal time and cost investment. I also have a sage bush and thyme for the same reason, and usually also end up growing tarragon and rosemary. Then there’s herbs I have a hard time or are impossible finding in stores like lovage (I’ve never seen it), chervil (hard to come by), cinnamon basil (one of my favorites, but I have to grow it myself), etc. Cilantro and parsley I don’t bother growing, because they’re dirt cheap (like 33 to 50 cents a bunch) at the grocery story, and they’d be using up garden space better suited for stuff like herbs, tomatoes, and peppers.
This is another one, too. Even just using the basic and dead simple no-knead recipe, the regular white bread is, I feel, better than any of the “artisan” breads sold at my grocery store’s bakery section for like $5 a loaf. The problem is that the bread is best enjoyed within about 12-24 hours, and then starts going fast (unless you toast it.)
That said, I’ve never been able to make the kind of fluffy yet lightly crisp sub/hoagie rolls at home, nor really excellent baguettes. Stuff like that, as well as the bolillos and talera rolls, the local bakeries do a far better job on than I could. But for a regular loaf of crispy crust white bread, I prefer what I make at home.
In general, no way. In some very specific instances, oh hell yes. The aforementioned herbs and vegetables, for example. If you’ve never tasted one, you have no idea the deliciousness of a still warm from the sun, fresh-picked tomato. We are usually up to our asses in tomatoes by the end of the summer. Minimal effort and cost, maximum return and flavor. Specific styles of beer are another. Can I compete with Coors in making pisswater beer? No. Can I crank out specialty beers better than the big boys make, and at a competitive price point? Most certainly. And that’s just not my opinion - I have the awards in competition to back it up. But sheer economies of scale will doom most home-made examples to failure.
This. I’m teaching myself auto mechanic stuff and am starting to get into more complex repairs as well as accepting that “good enough” is good enough for some things.
Getting parts online is vastly cheaper than what a garage charges, but it usually takes me four hours to accomplish a repair that a professional can do in an hour. In strict terms of DIY labor, I lose; I make far more than a mechanic’s hourly wage – but I love learning and challenging myself, so in the end it’s worth doing (on most days- I’ve a malfunctioning hood latch and am close to just burning the car down).
BTW Gato, both my lap and HPDE days were cancelled due to bad weather. I haz sads.
I didn’t think about it at the time because it’s been so long since I baked any, but bread is definitely something I can do better and cheaper. And bonus, my house smells like fresh baked bread for a couple of days afterwards.
Beer is something I wouldn’t try at home simply because I have friends who have done so and had me sample their results. They swear it’s the nectar of the gods and I’m pretty sure I’ve had 5 year old Schlitz (not intentionally) that tasted better. Now these are professional people who generally have good taste when it comes to material things so I have to wonder if they’re being serious about liking what they’ve made or just have some weird sense of obligation or if they’re just plain delusional.
There’s the key difference between us, then. And that may in general play into how people value their free time: by its abundance or scarcity.
That used to be true for me. Then a farmers’ market opened up near us. Whatever’s in season, I can get it there, cheaper than the grocery store, and as fresh as if it came from my garden. So I gave up gardening. 
Where you live makes a difference. If you can’t get the ingredients or materials close to home, it’s not going to be cheaper.
Gardening is cheaper than therapy, so my peppers and tomatoes give me double savings! 
Throw in a gym subscription and it gets to triple 
I can do some stuff better and cheaper at home, yeah. Not a lot, but growing some vegetables and herbs, plus some cooking. I discovered homemade pizza about a year ago, and at least 80% of the time it’s better than anything I could buy in this town and a fraction of the price.