Most of the time, I’m a real-food advocate. I much prefer fresh veggies to frozen or canned, and I’m the person who will go out of her way to go to the one store that stocks pork without all those additives.
Even I have to admit, however, that there are some things that are just as good fresh versus processed.
A short list:
Canned pumpkin. I will never make pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin again.
The aforementioned cake mixes. Yes, homemade cakes are different. But box cakes aren’t bad if you make your own frosting.
Canned beans (not green beans, I mean kidney beans, black beans, pintos, etc). Once again, “real” beans are a little different, but canned beans are much more convenient and almost undetectable.
Canned tomatoes. Really, a whole different ingredient than fresh tomatoes, so I don’t know if they belong on this list at all. But canned tomatoes are the base for a lot of sauces and soups, and fresh simply wouldn’t do.
Canned tuna. Kind of the same thing as canned tomatoes - it’s not the same as fresh tuna, and you use it in different ways. I get pissy when I see restaurants serving salad nicoise with fresh tuna. That just ain’t how it should be.
Frozen peas. They’re nice and sweet and crisp, and have the advantage of thawing very quickly. You need only add them at the last minute to soups and stews.
Frozen artichoke hearts. They’re a bit pricey, so I don’t get them too often, but they’re very convenient. They’re sold frozen loose in quartered pieces; I thaw them out, cut them a bit finer, and toss them into a garlicky dressing with fresh-cooked string beans and slivered sweet onions.
I love canned sardines. The fresh ones are very good, but it’s rare to find a fresh sardine outside of a Japanese market. The canned ones and rich and oily and convenient, and you can eat up the cooked bones and get a big ol’ dose of calcium.
Re the canned tomatoes: American canners add calcium citrate, which keeps the tomato or tomato pieces plump and somewhat firm. This pleases the American housewife, but the firm chunks resist being cooked down into sauce. I like to buy the plum tomatoes canned in Italy, as they forego the calcium citrate. The tomatoes will look slumpy and un-photogenic, but they are of much better flavor and they will fall apart into a sauce very easily.
I agree with pretty much all of the OP, although canned beans are sometimes mushy IMHO. Absolutely and definitely canned pumpkin - I went the hardcore route once and it wasn’t even as good. Canned tomatoes are often better than fresh, depending on the season. Also, many frozen vegetables are the same.
I’ll be the lone dissenting voice on canned pumpkin. It took about two years of experimenting, but my daughter’s pumpkin pies made from scratch are amazingly better than those made from canned pumpkin. They have a stronger pumpkin flavor and a heartier texture. One of the keys is the correct type of pumpkin. This makes as much difference as, for example, using granny smith apples instead of red delicious apples for making apple pie.
I prefer canned clams for most purposes. Fresh steamers are a treat, but for dips and soups I find the canned ones are just fine and so much less bother.
Pie crusts. Maybe if I was more consistent with my homemade crusts it would be different but I never know if I’ll get moist, delious, flaky crust or some horrible abomination when I make it fresh. Store bough crust is never better than the best but it is always good.
Plus the saving of time and frustration is priceless.
Oh no way… store bought pie crusts don’t compare to a good homemade one. Neither do biscuits.
I’ll say dried & boxed pasta is one of the few things that really does a credible job of being the real thing (i.e. freshly made pasta). It’s not exactly the same, but close, and a WHOLE lot easier to deal with.
Also, store-bought sausages. Yes, the homemade ones (assuming you’re talking about pork or beef ones) are marginally better, but the store bought ones can be pretty damned good.
Tamales. If you have an idea of how much work goes into making homemade tamales, the store-bought ones are awfully good, even if not just as good.
My wife agrees with as_u_wish. When I read the bit about canned pumpkin to my wife, she said “Well, they don’t prepare it right if they’re saying that.”
For the frosting, she says the canned dark chocolate frostings are probably better than what she could make, but agrees the others don’t taste right. We’ve found you have to get Duncan Hines, though. They use sugar as the main ingredient. Betty Crocker and Pillsbury have high fructose corn syrup as the main ingredient, and are goopy, hard to work with, don’t taste as good, and suck moisture from the air.
I’ll second this. The Mrs. just made a home-made pie crust using shortening and gentle blending, from a recipe she got on the net, and made the best damned pie crust I’ve eaten in ages!
Perogies. I love perogies, pan fried with bacon and onion and topped with sour cream. (Gee, high-calorie food is so flipping appealing.) But to make them from scratch is way, way too much work. So we go frozen pre-made.
Bread? I like the 12 grain bread you can get and I like a couple of local grocery stores’ bakery bread. But not the “factory bread” in the middle of the store. We have a bread maker, but it doesn’t come out all that often.
Stuff like pasta, tomato paste, canned tuna I regard less as “processed food” and more like kitchen staples. I have made homemade pasta and it was great, but so labour intensive.
The processed food that does not hold up for me is ultra-processed, like instant mashed potatoes, stuffing mixes, and frozen tater tots and breaded chicken. That stuff I think is crap. My husband likes that stuff. He even likes whipped cream that comes out of a can.
I like real homemade pie, cake, and whipped cream. But I’m more of a cook than a baker, so a homemade dessert is rare in our house. He’ll buy grocery store baked goods all the time, though.
If I were a housewife (ah, wouldn’t it be nice?) I’d make a lot more “real” food, whether or not my husband thinks it’s worth the effort. I do. But coming home from work at 6 at night, after being out of the house since 8 a.m., I just want to eat something, not spend hours making it. “Slow food” requires time.
Amen. I’ve made pierogi in the past, and, man, are they a pain in the ass. Even my Polish mother just sends me out to get pierogi (Alexandra’s on Central just north of Belmont if you’re in Chicago) because she can’t stand the work involved in making them.
I’m not totally convinced about canned pumpkin being equivalent or better to fresh, roasted pumpkin, but I definitely agree about the canned tomatoes. Unless you have fresh garden or farmer’s market tomatoes available, canned tomatoes are almost always a better choice for all your saucing/stewing/cooking needs.
When you make pastry you don’t want to create gluten strings in the first place. Working bread dough develops the gluten, gives bread the structure it requires to rise and stay risen.
Pastry flour has a lower protein content - gluten is protein. If you use pastry flour you have a better chance of tender pastry.
The trick with pastry is to cut the fat into the flour. I know there are some people who sort of smoosh it in with their fingertips, but a pastry blender works better and a food processor works best of all. Just don’t process the dough until it forms a ball. If mixing by hand, do it lightly and quickly and press the dough together rather than stir it.
There are a million recipes for pie pastry. Some have vodka as well as water, some are all butter, some are all lard (my usual pastry is the old, old recipe from the Tenderflake lard box), some are “press into the pan”. Pressed into the pan will not be flakey, but it will be tender.
Flakey pastry is pastry where the flour/water dough encases bits of fat. When it’s baked the fat melts, the water in the fat creates steam, and the steam expands the wee pocket and creates a flake.
There are some foods that aren’t meant to be “home made” in the sense of being freshly created. The dried pastas, for example. And often Europeans did not bake their daily bread - many kitchens did not have ovens as we know them here, and people commonly bought their bread from the baker. The baker’s oven would be used, in some places, for the people to bake something for a special occasion, or for the Sunday roast. Or there would be a communal oven and the use of it strictly governed by “seniority” or status.
Good quality canned vegetables are often superior to the “fresh” available out of season, particularly tomatoes - they aren’t so much a substitute as a different product with different expectations attached. Likewise with frozen. It is now possible to buy “fresh” peas, strawberries, blackberries, etc., from the southern hemisphere in our midwinter, but the local produce that was picked and frozen at the peak of quality is usually better and is undoubtedly cheaper.
Frozen pastry or pie shells or tart shells are good, when you don’t have the time or equipment to make it yourself.
You can make almost anything at home, if you want to take the time and trouble, but beyond the novelty factor there doesn’t seem to be much point with a lot of things. My cupboard always has Heinz ketchup and Grey Poupon mustard, etc., those are staples along with some canned turtle beans and Italian tomatoes.
However, when it comes to the discussion of cake mixes, my heart quails. I once bought a Duncan Hines cake mix and even my youngest son would not eat that cake. I still had to add oil and eggs, too, which made me wonder what the point of it was. I once tried a canned frosting - and we found it inedible. I guess it’s all in what you’re used to. And homemade icing is so easy! We also tried a frozen cake, a Sara Lee I think it was. It was just a cake mix cake that had been frozen, as far as we could tell.
Right. Packaged cake mixes are quite nice when combined with home-made frosting. In fact, given the fact that scratch cakes can go disasterously wrong, I think packaged mixes are better.
That’s 'cause I’m a dolt – I should have said “form” rather than “break”. My apologies for putting it backwards. Thanks for the well stated correction.