After my wedding, my wife and I eagerly bought a KitchenAid Pro 6000 with dreams of tasty bread.
Her first attempt came out as something that can be best described as a wheat-horror loaf. Impossibly dense, somehow simultaneously gummy and gritty, and a flavor that put one in mind of mud, bran, and salt. We gazed sadly into each others’ eyes for several minutes, ate the rest of the meal, and consigned our poor mixer to cake batter for the better part of a year.
After mustering courage, she attempted an herbed baguette recipe. It was delicious, and sunlight returned to my world.
I agree, years ago I made pizza every Friday night, and it always came out so thick and heavy, no matter HOW hard I tried to stretch the dough thin. It was more like a foccaccia bread, not like pizza. English muffin pizzas were tastier - pizza made with a flour tortilla base were tastier than my doorstop gobstoppers.
Cakes made from scratch are ridiculously easy and a hundred times better than any box cake, IMO. Same with chocolate pudding - sugar, cocoa, cornstarch, milk, a pinch of salt, a drop of vanilla extract, there’s no comparison.
One more for bread. People don’t understand how easy it is to make something edible – even if it isn’t pretty – just by doing the bare minimum.
Cooking dried beans is one that surprises me that some people are scared of. What? Put some water on them and cook until done.
Rice is another one – raise your hand if you ever heard anyone say, “I just can’t make good rice, you make it [insert name here]Jack!” The people I’ve heard say these types of things have twenty or thirty years on me, and I have to teach them how to make RICE? Or heat some flour and water and salt and leavener in an oven? Sheesh.
ETA FU poached eggs person I can’t reliably make a good poached egg without paying a lot of attention and wasting some eggs. I guess our standards differ
You can get pretty thin by hand, but there’s a certain style of Midwest cracker crust pizza that I can’t roll out thin enough (it’s a dough that takes to rolling out), no matter how hard I try. The pizza joints all use sheeters and run the dough through it a couple of times. I can’t replicate that at home. I’m better at doing the more Neapolitan-type styles at home (and I have my methods for getting around the limitation of not having a wood-fired brick oven.)
I agree with Jadelin. It surprises me that so many people find rice so difficult (without a rice cooker.)
(Two family “secret” recipes: banana pudding is the recipe on the Nabisco Nilla Wafer box. And my grandmother’s locally famous red velvet cake recipe? My husband loves it, so I agreed to try to weasel the recipe from her. I telephoned her, prepared to beg and plead, notebook in hand, ready to write down her arcane secrets… “Oh, it’s the one on the back of the Swansdown flour box.” Of course, “my” pecan pie recipe, which has garnered semi-serious marriage proposals, is from a Junior League cookbook…)
Indeed. I was just watching re-runs of the Fat Ladies last night and they made it outside over a gas ring at a Boy Scout cookout. Being who they are, they cooked crumbled Stilton into the soup.
If you’re willing to ignore my recent post on some of the technical glitches I still have to iron out, I’ll go with preparing bacon. Everybody seems impressed but it amounts to rubbing salt and brown sugar slurry over good pork bellies, turning over in the fridge for a few days, and then smoking for an afternoon while you sip beer, watch golf, and tend the fire once every hour or so.
Canning tomatoes. This isn’t exactly making food but why buy those cans of tomatoes in the store when you can put up your own so easily for awesome soups and stews over the winter?
Whipped cream. Make some by hand. It’s really easy, I promise, and you don’t even need an electric mixer. Everyone will look at you like you just cured cancer.
Grav lax: see Huerta’s bacon-making post above, swap white sugar for brown, add dill and just skip the smoking part. Done! Heads will turn at every party.
Paella, the other risotto. Granted, it’s harder to make correctly than risotto, particularly knowing when you’ve got a nice crust on the bottom, but haven’t burned the rice.
Shrimp Creole: Making the roux is the only iffy part of this, but it ain’t difficult.
Gravy: the bane of most cooks, but a piece of cake, really. Again with the roux, already.
The trick to doing it at home is to roll the dough very thin, pre-bake the dough briefly by itself on a preheated sheet until you get a crust forming, then rapidly put on the toppings and finish it back in the oven. Think of it like pre-searing a rare steak.
The still doesn’t give an Italian style crust. Doesn’t get nearly hot enough and comes out too dry and crispy for the style I’m aiming for. (Also, Italian-style pizza is not generally rolled.) I have a technique I prefer for that hand-formed style. I have a cast-iron pizza pan which I heat over medium high heat for about 10 minutes. I form my pizza on the peel, slide it over to the pan, cook for about 2-3 minutes, then finish in a preheated oven, under the broiler. That’s the closest I’ve come to doing Naples-style pies at home without hacking my oven. (There’s a hack where you can cut the safety latch in the oven and cook the pizza on the “Oven Clean” setting, which gets to 900+ degrees.) My technique gives you the flavorful black flecking/char on the bottom of your pie (which to me is one of the most important features of the style), but it’s not quite the same results as if you were cooking in an environment where all sides are getting hit by blazing heat all at the same time.
This year for the first time ever, I decided I’d venture into the mysterious and scary world of making preserves. First, with fresh strawberries, and then with fresh peaches. I don’t know if I can ever buy preserves ever again.
My mother never made it, nor did I have friends who did. It sounded so complicated. But it’s not. The worst part is the prep and cleanup, and even that’s not hard, just time consuming. My next batch (peach again) will be made with proper staging - I’ll have everything ready to go so I can pay attention to my stirring and boiling.
Silly me - I assumed there was some sort of trick involved, something learned only after many failures. Nah - read the directions, do what it says, enjoy!
I also, for the first time, made tomato sauce from tomatoes grown in my own garden. I’m turning into an earth mother!
I can’t reliably make a good poached egg without paying a lot of attention and wasting some eggs. I guess our standards differ 
