I was thinking of the kind of ramen noodles you boil in water in a pan, not the kind you just add water to, though admittedly there’s not much difference. But the OP mentioned buying ramen from ramen shops. Boiling it yourself does require a bit more effort than that: you have to take some action to transform something inedible into something that’s ready to eat. In the amount of effort involved, it’s roughly comparable in my mind to making eggs yourself (e.g. boiling or frying them) vs. ordering eggs at a diner.
I don’t think it’s just about some amount of effort - but the the OP says
“Japanese don’t make ramen themselves” cannot be referring to boiling the noodles in water or adding hot water to a cup with a flavor packet added - doing that could never be described as “time-consuming and labor-intensive”. “Make ramen themselves” must mean either making the noodles themselves , or buying the noodles and making the broth , adding seasoning and toppings etc. In the egg example, when you scramble/boil the eggs, you are doing exactly what the cook at the diner is doing - with the ramen, the cooks at the restaurant are not boiling the noodles with a pre-packaged flavor packet.
Yeah, that’s not what E is talking about when E says Japanese people don’t make ramen for themselves. It’s not about instant ramen. It’s about actual ramen noodle soup made from scratch. If you’ve ever had ramen at a real noodle shop, you wouldn’t consider it to be in the same food category as instant ramen packets. Except for being noodles in soup there’s almost nothing in common about the eating experience.
Continuing the aside about ramen, you can get good (not amazing, but good) quality dried noodles, but for me, the key element of a really, really good dish is the quality of your broth. And it’s there that most home cooks cut corners.
Aaaaand now I have to go watch my copy of the great noodle western, Tampopo!
Which should also qualify as a nearly everyday soup/food item that is easy-ish to make at home, but most people just buy, whether you’re talking about a basic broth or stock.
Many years ago (late 1950s?) when package cake mixes came on the market the manufacturers found that they weren’t selling well. The home cooks used to baking felt like it was “cheating” to just take the mix, add water, stir, & bake. The result was home-made, but not home-made enough. So they turned their nose up at the product.
Somebody had an idea: remove the powdered egg from the mix, and change the instructions to be “Add an egg, water, stir, and bake.” A miracle occurred. The product was harder to use, but sales skyrocketed. Now the result was home-made enough to satisfy the homemaker’s conscience.
To this day many (most?) cake mixes require the added fresh egg.
I’m pretty sure that story about eggs and cake mix is in urban legend. Apparently the real reason was that those early cake mixes where you just had to add water contained dried eggs, and they just weren’t very good. The mixes where you add a fresh egg sold better because the cakes tasted better.
Snopes has an article about it:
Cool. Thanks for educating me.
Exactly. No one here is saying any of the mentioned food items can’t be made at home or that home-made foods are inferior. The topic of the thread is foods people generally don’t (or wont) make at home. Mayo is definitely lined-up with the OP, no matter how easy to make or dangerous to your health it may be.
Certainly. But DigitalC’s “takes like 2 minutes” and “far superior product” implied a certain level of “people are so dumb and lazy”. I was answering that implication, not arguing whether mayo fit the thread.
Some people certainly are lazy, including myself. But, a lot of them are also not confident cooks, and (rightly or wrongly) believe that they have no skills in the kitchen. Even if they were told that a recipe is, “easy to make!,” they will probably still believe that it’s beyond their skill level.
It doesn’t matter that mayo is easy to make from scratch. If I need some for a sandwich or whatever, I might just need a tablespoon right now and then another tablespoon next month or whenever. Making it from scratch is wasteful compared to using some commercial mayo from a jar.
Yeah I was agreeing with your point, and adding the part about the thread. I think I could have worded it better, on reflection.
We just make it and keep it like any other mayo. We are obviously not making a spoonful of mayo every time we want some.
But homemade mayo only keeps about a week or so while commercial mayo is good for a couple of months after the best buy date if it’s refrigerated after opening. If I only use a tablespoon of mayo a week , I’m making around a cup or so a week and tossing most of it.
I have made mayo many times in amounts as large as a quart, and have never had a problem with it spoiling.
If you’ve got a proper tortilla press and a cast iron skillet, tortillas are actually pretty easy.
Tamales though… we made some for this last Christmas, and while they’re all surprisingly delicious, the amount of effort, prep, and stuff involved was colossal. I firmly believe that we’re buying them from now on out after that 3 day effort-a-thon
Pickles are an example of something that are really not terribly hard to make, but people overwhelmingly buy them rather than DIY, unless they’re gardeners with bumper crops.
Well sure, tortillas aren’t complicated or anything but doing them up from scratch is time consuming and the product isn’t super better than buying fresh made from the tienda. I mean, bread isn’t difficult either and yet most people don’t bake bread from scratch because it’s time consuming, not because it’s all that complicated or the ingredients hard to assemble.
Tamales, filled wonton, lumpia and the like are all examples of fairly simple foods that nonetheless take SUCH a lot of time and effort that they’re firmly in the “special occasions only” basket. I think of foods like that as “see how much I love you?” foods that are special far in excess of their admittedly enormous yumminess just because of the effort involved.
I think most gringos aren’t even going as far as “buying freshly made [tortillas] from the tienda”. Instead, I think most of us would buy, from a supermarket, the ones in a plastic bag from a brand like Mission.
You know what I find mind boggling? AT the tienda, where they make fresh tortillas daily, they also sell the whole slate of commercial tortillas as well. There is no price advantage to buying the Don Pancho or Mission or whatever brand, there are better, fresher tortillas right next to them on the shelf made every day right there and yet somebody is buying the inferior ones. I dungeddit.
There’s something like 64 tablespoons in a quart - at a tablespoon a week, that would take more than a year so clearly you use a lot more than the tablespoon a week I would.