I tried Alton Brown’s hummus recipe last night, only I cranked up the garlic and used sesame oil instead of EVOO. It is yummy. It got me to thinking about how many foods – like bread, pancakes, pizza, beer, cookies and cheesecake – are so much better homemade from scratch than ready-made or from a box. Now I’m wondering if there are any foods that the commercial versions are better than an easily made homemade from scratch version.
Fried chicken from Popeye’s is about the only thing I can think of that I can’t make a better version at home.
I guess the advantage of homemade is that you can adjust to your own tastes. I love garlic so anything I make with garlic gets an extra kick of it over the commercial version. The danger of homemade is consistency, though. Commercial brands have QC that makes everything the same way every time. Mistakes can happen in the home kitchen. For instance, I think I added the butter too soon last time I made fudge and it ended up grainy. I’ve since purchased a candy thermometer so hopefully that won’t happen again.
But I believe the usually better quality outweighs the occassional goof. What say ye, dopers?
The only time I prefer storebought over the self-produced is when it’s something that includes items I can’t procure (or that are just completely unfeasible to purchase).
Barring those situations, I think the work you put into it adds something. Especially if it’s something you’re feeding to other people.
Proper French baguettes are better bought as the equipment used to make them is rather specialised.
Similarly, certain types of middle eastern flat breads which rely on very hot, clay ovens.
Olive Oil is better bought.
Canned tomatos from italy are often better than fresh ones out of season.
Sea Salt is arguably better bought (especially if your not close to the ocean).
Bleached flour performs better than flour you could mill yourself in certain applications.
A variety of low fat/low sugar/low carb products can be made better in a lab than at home.
Unless you feel like playing with liquid nitorgen, commercial ice-creams are usually smoother due to being chilled faster.
A variety of cured and smoked meats are better bought unless you happen to have your own smoker.
I will say that I prefer homemade icecream to storebought: it may not be smoother, but its freshness, and the quality of the ingredients, usually makes up for this. (The coffee icecream I make is unsurpassed, in my experience).
And the second time I made pita bread at home, it came out spectacularly; again, the freshness of it made up for the fact that I wasn’t using a proper oven. If you’re talking about other ME flatbreads, that obviously doesn’t apply.
Cheese
Wine
Dry aged beef
Store bought mayo, while inferior to home made tastwise, is remarkably more shelf-stable.
European style Butter and real Buttermilk both are not reproducible at home.
Left Hand: Obviously, inferior ingredients can’t be made up with superior equipment. But after several ice-cream jags through New Zealand over the years, I’m convinced that at best, my attempts at making ice-cream are but paltry kitchen slop.
I’m not sure real churned buttermilk is available in the United States at a consumer level. Our cultured buttermilk is skim milk with cultured bacteria that give the acidic taste, similar to but not quite the same as real buttermilk. The only real buttermilk you can get is homemade. It difficult and nigh-on impossible to find non-homogenized raw milk anymore. But if you can find a source you can make Real Buttermilk and Real Butter that will far exceed the quality of what you store buy.
Cheeses can definately be made at home that will equal commercial varities.
But olive oil isn’t what I meant. I was meaning, mostly, baked goods. I don’t mean milling your own flour or processing your own sugar. Just the final product made with commonly available ingredient.
I reckon it’s better to buy bagels and I’ll grant you wine.
Indian pastes and simmer sauces, specifially the Taj (I think) brand. I’ve tried, but mine never turn out as good as what I can get out of the jar. I find the Trader Joe’s knock-off to be a bit too bland. It will do in a pinch, though.
Enchilada sauce. I wouldn’t even bother trying to make it myself.
I don’t think there’s any debate about whether cookies, pizza, chili, or spaghetti sauce are better made at home.
And making your own chicken with gravy, mashed potatoes and apple crisp is going to be better than a TV dinner.
There’s a line in there somewhere though. I use canned whole tomatoes for spaghetti sauce.
There’s some things you really can’t get around. . .ice cream, potato chips, soda, ketchup. Sure, there are homemade alternatives to all of them, but be realistic. Homemade bread is unquestionably better, but if I’m going to be having toast a couple times this week and a couple sandwiches on the weekend, I’m not making a loaf of bread at home.
If I make beans or chili, i’ll make my own corn bread, but that’s part of the meal.
With enough practice, you can probably make better fried chicken than Popeye’s at home, but it’s usually a friggin mess.
I’m not giving up on the icecream front :). I’ve eaten fine gelatos in Italy, and I’ve certainly got my favorite ice-cream parlors here in town and in other cities, but I’d still put my Turkish Coffee Custard ice-cream up against the best of them. The mouthfeel of ice cream that started freezing a half-hour before its consumption is inimitable.
And baking bread at home pretty much only works if you’ve got at least two people dedicated to eating it. I’ve got half a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread and half a loaf of whole-wheat bread at home now, and we’re industriously packing it away. If you only eat bread a few times a week, you either need to become the Bread Fairy and give loafs away, or stick with storebought.
I’m with you on the ice cream Left Hand of Dorkness. Especially with the availability of cheap ice cream makers that don’t require hauling out the rock salt and ice, I think commericial is only for convenience not quality.
[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
Unless you feel like playing with liquid nitrogen, commercial ice-creams are usually smoother due to being chilled faster.QUOTE] I* totally * want to play with liquid nitrogen! I saw that episode of** The Tonight Show! ** Fresh cream sugar vanilla and stuff turned into smooth gourmet ice cream in what – 20 seconds after pouring and quick stirring?
I definately know that Plugra and similar French style butters can be imported into the US and I’ve heard good things about artisinal butter makers from Vermont who ,IIRC, are making proper, cultured butters.
I grant that some of the softer cheeses can definately be made at home but I don’t know anybody with the time or equipment to make a proper 18 month parmigano reggiano for example.
Maus: Ice-cream fundamentally depends on the cream. Beyond that, the technique becomes fairly basic, if slightly technical in nature. For nearly any home consumer, finding a source of cream that’s not UHT pasturised and has a high enough turnover that it’s fresh is going to be nigh on impossible unless you happen to be on a dairy cattle farm. The second thing that home makers have going against them is they simply don’t have good access to really really fast chilling. Smoothness is purely a function of ice-crystal size which is purely a function of chilling rate. Unless your willing to muck around with liquid nitrogen, commerical ice-cream will always be smoother if made right.
**Trunk:**I’ll grant you soda is one thing that is probably impossible to duplicate at home. potato chips and ketchup though are things that I routinely make. Potato chips requires nothing more than a mandolin, some potatos, some hot oil and some good sea salt. In fact, it’s one of the easier fried potato dishes and virtually foolproof. Home-made potato chips seem to have this magic window of about 5 minutes right after the too-hot-to-handle-stage where they have this magical crunch and warmth which they loose once they cool down. After eating some fresh potato chips, commercial brands start feeling like limp cardboard.
Ketchup, being something that will keep virtually indefinately, is something I make once a year in a huge batch. When tomatos are at their cheapest, farmers almost literally resort to giving away their slightly bruised and mangy selections if you know them well enough.
I make cheesecake at home. I’ll have to say it can be a pain in the rear end and not any better than a “good” store bought cheesecake. Same with tiramisu - particularly the ladyfingers - just buy the darn things. On a dessert level, there are a lot of things that just aren’t worth bothering with, unless you enjoy the bother (which I do, which is why I’ve been known to make cheesecake at home).
I can never cook a really good tenderloin at home. Its ok, but its better when someone else does it. Its a lot of money to put into a peice of meat you want medium rare if you get the tempurature wrong. But that isn’t “store bought” as much as its “restaurant bought and made by someone who went to culinary school which I didn’t.”
I’ve made bagels at home - incredible pain in the back end and nearly inedible. Practice might help, but at least the first attempt was a dismal failure. The chocolate croissants did turn out very well, but did take nearly an entire day of my life and weren’t any better than the ones from the bakery.
But all this also depends - are we talking about buying a loaf of bread at the Superstore, or a loaf of bread from an expensive bakery? A bakery is often just as fresh, has access to high quality ingrediants, and is just as good as what I can make myself - sometimes better. Sara Lee chocolate cake is nothing to write home about, but Woullet’s bakery makes a few chocolate cakes I’ve spent hours in the kitchen trying to imitate and not coming close.
Dangerosa: Invest in a Probe thermometer, it takes absolutely all the guesswork out of roasting and it’s criminal to waste a $100 piece of meat because of lack of a $20 piece of equipment.
Thermometers and scales are two vastly underused pieces of equipment in home kitchens fueled by the vicious cycle of mass-cookbook writers. Because cookbooks assume you don’t have a scale or a thermometer, they don’t mention weights and temperatures. Because you never read about weights or temperatures, you never feel the need to buy a scale or thermometer.
Yeah, the cream quality is important, but so is the quality of the flavoring agents, the eggs, etc. If I get top-quality ingredients at home, it’s likely going to be better than the ingredients used in any ice cream available in most markets.
The techniques used to make ice cream vary pretty widely: some use custard bases, for example, while others don’t. My wife’s favorite recipe for peppermint ice cream involves soaking starlight mints in milk overnight. Some recipes call for beating the cream and folding it in; most do not.
Smoothness isn’t purely a function of ice-crystal size, and ice-crystal size isn’t purely a function of chilling rate. The mouthfeel of smoothness is contributed to in large part by fats and lecithins (the latter of which appears in egg yolks), and I believe that both these components hinder the formation of large ice crystals.
Indeed, one of the problems I’d had with homemade ice cream is that it’s too smooth, to the point of having a slightly greasy mouthfeel. I don’t know whether this was the result of my using too much cream to milk in my recipe, or whether I was using old cream that had significant fat separation, or whether the cream got overchurned at some point in the recipe, or what–but certainly there wasn’t a hint of roughness in that batch, even though it would’ve benefited from it.
I’m glad you mentioned bagels. They are tough to make. I have been narrowing down how to make good ones, and I’m getting closer I guess. I want my bagels to be crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, like they are in NYC. Last time I was there, I noticed a couple of things. Good bagels come from ovens with a really high temp, like 500 degrees. I have had better success since I tried this at home. Though I am still not totally happy with my efforts, I haven’t found any store-bought bagels that come close to the ones you get in nearly any New York deli. I guess I even like my own better than the ones from the store.
As you can see, “slow freezing” is one of the causes, but it’s way down on the list.
Much of this website is way over my head, but it looks like pretty interesting stuff, even if the recipes they offer are appalling (some of them, I shit you not, use coffee whitener). I think it’s designed for the large processing plant, but the science should be valid for the home cook as well.
