What food or foods apply this statement to you, if any?
What foods MUST you have homemade version, no exceptions, deal-breaking, drawing the line in the sand on?
I’m talking about how other foods may come and go and you’ll settle for out of the can or box or bag stuff with, but that ONE food that you will always INSIST on having from scratch, even if you have to make it yourself.
Subsequently, this could also be taken as a “What would you say your best homemade dish is and will “Pshaw” anyone who ever even remotely suggests that you buy pre-made?” type of topic.
If you don’t have any particular food that fits the bill, feel free to tell us stories about family members or friends who have a certain food that this must apply to.
For my mom, it’s stuffing (for Thanksgiving). You don’t ever want to suggest to her maybe using something like “Stove Top Stuffing”. She’s liable to dropkick you out of the kitchen for it.
For me: Mashed potatoes. Real mashed ones just taste better than any box kind ever could.
Frosting. I can’t bring myself to buy the pre-made stuff in the can. The only exception is decorating frosting - sometimes I don’t have time to make all the colors and deal with the bags and tips and stuff. So sometimes I buy the tubes.
I don’t judge those who use pre-made frosting, but I will never buy it myself. I don’t mind the taste, but I can definitely tell when it’s pre-made.
Damn, I had no idea it was so easy (I just googled it). Bonus points for being 90% cheaper! I’m going to have to start doing this.
My thing is salsa. It’s quick and easy and I’ve never had a store bought salsa that even comes close to being as good as homemade. (You might find some salsa fresca in the deli that is up to par, but I’ve never tasted a jar salsa as good as homemade.)
I’ve made mayo before and it was darn good, but it seemed wasteful. I had to make about a half cup just to use a couple tablespoons, and it went bad in a week.
Cabbage soup. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen it in a can.
A thousand ways to make it: meat, rice or potatoes, cabbage, celery, onions, maybe some legumes, tomatoes heat in broth. Throw in some garlic, salt, and spices. Yum.
I was just talking about this with my wife while shopping for thanksgiving. We watched a couple buy a can of gravy and I just shook my head and walked away. Gravy is incredibly simple to make and the homemade kind has so much more flavor, its the equivalent of buying scrambled eggs at the grocery store.
Here’s mine. I wish I had a smaller recipe, but on the other hand, I use quite a bit of it.
1/4 cup olive oil
1 3/4 cups vegetable oil (I pour both into a 2 cup measuring cup)
2 egg yolks
1 whole egg
1 tablespoon yellow mustard
5 tablespoons lemon juice
1 pinch of salt
1 grind of black pepper
Pour 1/4 cup of the oil mixture into the blender, then drop in the egg yolks, the egg, the salt, pepper, mustard and lemon juice (rinsing the mustard out of the tablespoon measure with the lemon juice).
Blend the mixture for a couple of minutes (you may need to scrape the mustard into the mix with a spatula).
Then, slowly pour the remaining 1 3/4 cups of oil into the running blender. You may have to pause blending to break up a bubble and ensure the entire mixture has blended.
The hardest part of the entire process is cleaning the blender. But the only other items to clean are a spatula, the measuring cup and a tablespoon - minimal clean-up is very high on my list of priorities when cooking.
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As a vegan I would no longer eat this, but as a child I was fond of Lemon Curd, Any commercial variant is unacceptable. And come to think of it, practically unobtainable… One of those things gone with the wind…
Home made is over-rated, if for no other reasons than that most people are not nearly as good a cook as they think they are, and quality commercial foods aren’t anywhere near as “bad” as some snobs “think” they are. I can easily find in SoCal commercially available products that can blow away 99% of what people swear must be home made.
None. I find many home cooks and bakers are less adept at their craft than they’d like to think. (The biggest and it’s probably because I live in Minnesota, is under-spicing.)
That being said, I find more and more, I prefer homemade frosting and canned frosting to bakery frosting. It tastes like sugary shortening.
Premade (like in the deli/hot food section of the supermarket,) frozen, and ones made from a box (like potato flakes) are all garbage. It’s not like real ones are hard! Yeah, a tiny bit of work (washing and cutting up some potatoes, then the mashing,) but the actual process is simple.
Just mash the boiled potatoes with a shitload of butter, cream (if you must, just milk…won’t be as good, though,) salt, and pepper. Boom. Done. Yeah, if you want to go fancy you can add roasted garlic, or something, but a basic mashed potato recipe with just those five ingredients can be perfect.
Nasty stuff commercial. Plus, I’m not interested in the “zest” - fuck “zest”, it’s just the bitter oil from the skin, which is…bitter oil from the skin. Hello. BITTER. I like TART, not BITTER.
Yoyu would have loved my Acid Pie when you weren’t vegan… amazing buttery sweet crumb crust, loaded with super tart, fresh, homemade curd. (Fro the gallery: it’s bascially lemon custard: lemon juice, eggs, and sugar. Heaven. But kinda gassy, for some reason…)
Hmmmm… I guess your crowd is made up of not-so-great cooks. My problem is that at my financial level, the vast majority of foods available commercially are not worth the money, since my cooking is superior in almost every instance. About the only things I can’t do better at home are pizza (man, I’d love to have a pizza oven…THEN I could nail it…) and some specific, ethnic things like gyros, which I would love to try sometime.
Now if I could afford to eat at the pricier joints, that would be different. But any meal I can get locally for under $20-$30, I can almost certainly do a better job at home.