I guess most people buy them simply for convenience, but don’t forget that not everyone can actually slice their own veggies. Arthritic hands find it difficult or impossible, and it’s a real chore if you have only one useable arm - not just people who only actually have one arm or paralysis down one side, but people with arms in slings or casts.
I imagine there are plenty of other disabilities that make some simple kitchen tasks more difficult, and people are expected to live independently these days.
Plus there’s tourists buying something to have for lunch or a picnic, office workers who might not have access to a fridge (making the food less tasty if you bring it in from home), and people who simply haven’t learnt the necessary skills. Not that there is much skill involved, but you only know that once you’ve done it.
But I don’t want gallons worth; I’d never use that much. Plus if I had to buy all the ingredients separately, they would end up costing a lot more than the bottle of salad dressing, and I’d have leftovers of some of them because they wouldn’t come out even. Plus, the time and effort required for all that dicing and mixing may be something I’d rather not spend. Especially if I’d not done it before nor seen someone else do it, and I had to invest a lot of time figuring out what I was doing. Plus I might want the salad dressing someplace where I didn’t have the facilities for preparing it myself.
The salad dressing’s just an example, but those are all good reasons why someone might buy things premade.
I read an article once about a year ago about ten ways to save money. Pretty much everything on the list involved making commonly sold products at home. I basically lost interest about 7 items in because while I understand it’s relatively easy and cost effective I’m just simply not interested in making my own condiments, laundry detergent etc. I’m willing to pay a few dollars for those products instead of paying a few quarters for the raw materials and spending time preparing them.
Plus, generally homemade sauces and dressing don’t have the same preservatives and shelf life of store bought stuff. A jar of mayo will last almost to expiration date in my house, for example.
I can get behind the questioning of people who buy preboiled eggs, wrapped potatoes, and the pre-peeled / sliced fruit in the produce aisle. Primarily because unlike condiments the cheaper versions of those are all more reasonable. A dozen eggs lasts decently long in the fridge, and boiling is extremely easy. Potatoes likewise, you can buy a bag and they last for a long time in a cabinet and are easy to prepare. Fruit has a shorter shelf life but you can buy it in whatever quantity you want, and I’m fine just chewing an apple skin and all and don’t need them presliced.
But sauces and condiments, I understand people that don’t buy them. If you’re one person at home it can be very ingredient heavy relative to how fast you’ll consume the raw ingredients and the finished product and time intensive compared to alternatives to make your own stuff.
Yeah, convenience for me and then there are just the two of us, easier to buy things pre-cut and pre-made now. (I can buy any number of hot or cold cooked foods in the grocery store now, $8 a lb., but if I’d bought all the ingredients I would end up with too much food and spent too much money.) Though I do like to cook there are some people here who have eaten the very same things their whole life since they sprouted their first teeth and can not handle anything else. Give them homemade mac & cheese made with four cheeses, and home made bread, and salad with your own secret recipe Italian dressing, and they don’t WIKE it, mommy always gave them the Kraft crap, Wonder bread, and salad with Wishbone dresssing and GODDAMIT NO OTHER. :mad:
I agree, dumb pre-wrapped 'taters for nuking are stupid. Chopped veggies to make soup, etc. are mostly bought by seniors citizens with arthritis, and delicate ladies who live in McMansions, who have long fake nails and blance at the thought of cutting an onion but would still like to try their hand at a TV chef recipe. The pre-bottled minced garlic is always awful, but some people consider handling raw garlic like toxic waste and will try to avoid it.
Salad dressing? I can make a damn good Italian dressing, and I generally have the ingredients on hand, but sometimes I just don’t want to. Some nights, it’s more than enough work to cut up the veggies and wash the lettuce, and I never buy any pre-cut veggies/lettuce because I don’t like them. Dressing, though, there’s plenty of store-bought dressing that I like just fine, and often decide to use that because I don’t feel like making a vinegarette.
Mayo? I agree, homemade mayo is better. But hell if I’m going to make a batch of homemade mayo that only lasts a few days in the fridge because I want 2 teaspoons on a sandwich. It’s hard to make less than about 1/2-3/4 cup of homemade mayo, and unless I know I’m making something that will use it in the next few days, I’ll grab the jar.
But I’m with you on the hard-boiled eggs and the pre-wrapped potatoes. Heck, I don’t even buy bagged lettuce, it never is very fresh.
[Quote=Chefguy]
Minced garlic in a jar. Not just because it’s cut up, but because it tastes like crap.
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When I worked downtown I caught the bus to and from work, which saved a ton of money but added a lot of time. I left the house at 6:30 and got home at 6:30.
When I came home I was tired and didn’t want to spend an hour or more cooking. Yeah I could make pasta sauce from scratch and it would be so much better. But unless I had company on a weekend, it was a lot easier to open a jar of Pregu and heat it for 3 minutes. Plus, although I could cook some things my cooking skills were limited back then (I’ve gotten better since).
Not everyone is a chef. Not everyone likes to cook, and some that do enjoy cooking are pressed for time so they take lots of shortcuts or buy pre-made stuff.
And buying larger quantities doesn’t save you any money if you don’t use all of it. I really don’t eat potatoes very often, I prefer rice with most meals. They have little tiny potatoes for $4 and up, and 5 and 10 pound bags. Every time I bought a 5 pound bag at least half to 3 quarters went to waste. So now the few times I want potatoes I buy some loose ones. Even though the cost per potato is more expensive, the cost per amount of potatoes that I actually eat is cheaper.
As some have pointed out, there may be a place for things like precut fruit - as an individual serving or snack. I am not sure there’s a valid place for larger quantities obviously intended for several servings.
Most of the above items fall into a category I’ve discerned: people who don’t or won’t cook on a regular basis have likely never learned how; a minimal investment in cookware and you can turn out fresh, tasty marinara-style sauces all day long for a fraction of the cost of bottled. But if you have nothing but junk cookware and one crappy knife, it can be an overwhelming chore to make it fresh. So it’s a lifetime, or some very long stretch, of buying second-rate, overpriced crap food, with every weak justification in the world, instead of investing a few months and something under a hundred dollars in a set of basic cooking skills that will turn out better, cheaper food… often more easily.
I suggest that a year of Home Ec should still be a high school requirement.
I will cop to occasionally buying jarred garlic mush. Generally when I’m making 20+ quarts of pasta sauce or chili at once. That’s a whole lot of garlic prep time saved, and since the garlic is just one of many flavors and I don’t want it sharp, it works.
If you taste it out of the jar, it’s much closer to roasted garlic than fresh garlic. Sometimes that’s okay.
Regarding ‘pasta sauce’, I don’t make my own sauce from tomatoes, mostly because I prefer my sauces on the smooth side and don’t have the patience to do all the simmering/pureeing/whatever it would take to reduce tomatoes to that consistency. So I buy ‘plain’ canned tomato sauce and then add other ingredients to liven it up a little: dry herbs, minced onion, ground pepper and garlic, that kind of thing.
We make our own salad dressing sometimes. And sometimes, I buy it. It’s all about convenience and what’s important to you. Homemade salad dressing is great, but storebought salad dressing is good, and they have about 1 million varieties. I don’t have time to try all those.
I don’t buy pre-cut veggies but let me tell you, if you’re not a very good cook, they now have precut veggie assortments. So you buy a little packet of beans or brussel sprouts or whatever and it tells you how to cook them. I’ve seen them and I’m guessing if I was living alone I might buy those. Why? It’s convenient, and it’s less waste - it’s just enough for a meal or two, and they’re already precut and it saves time.
Here’s a big surprise for you: not everyone enjoys cooking. Cooking for me is mostly just a chore. I have to eat, so I have to cook, but I’d honestly rather just have food appear before me. I’m not that fond of takeout, so I do cook, but really, at least during the weekdays, I don’t want to cook at all.
Takes time, though. Opening up a bottle of sauce and pouring it in the skillet takes what, 10 seconds?
And I’ll admit to occasionally buying the pre-cut and washed green beans just because I hate the tedium of cutting all the stems off. My interest in cooking is pretty minimal most evenings.
Yes, but even starting with canned tomato sauce is using a shortcut. The way I see it is that there is a continuum from making everything from scratch (e.g., pasta sauce from homegrown tomatoes) to eating the dish in a restaurant. Each of us chooses for particular dishes and meals where on that continuum you wish to be at that moment. Personally, pasta at home (using jarred sauce and dry premade pasta) is easy and cheap enough that generally I don’t order it in restaurants. But I also have it so rarely that I’m not going to make my own pasta or sauce.
Likewise, there’s a dish I make that requires a couple of pounds of diced onions. I’ve learned from Jacques Pépin’s cooking shows the correct way to dice an onion, and I’ve tried that method, but my dices aren’t as uniform as they appear in these videos. So I was pleased to see that I could buy three pounds of diced onion in a local market for four bucks. I’m well aware that this is a high price to pay per pound of raw onion but I’m willing to accept that.
Starting from tomatoes is only a valid option in that short season when you can buy something like real tomatoes (that is, not red styrofoam balls) at something like a reasonable price.
But you don’t have to start with the horror that is canned tomato sauce (or worse, paste) - you are getting precooked glop with buckets of food-garbage thrown in, most notably our old friend HFCS.
Stock up instead on crushed tomatoes - they are the closest you can get to unprocessed and still be convenient. My basic spaghetti sauce uses one large can of crushed, one small can of diced (for some texture) - and anything else is because I put it there, not because Del Monte thinks I need nine kinds of crap in my food.
For me the price of a bottle is .99. You can barely buy a bottle of vinegar for that price let alone a variety of herbs with which to flavor it. A lemon? .59 down to .50 when buying 4.
I hate having to buy fresh herbs, which I do occasionally for certain dishes. They’re very expensive with a short shelf life. Three types of fresh herb in the dish? Add $7.50-$9 to the cost of the meal. (There is a new distributor available in my market which is cheaper for smaller amounts, but that’s been less than a year)
Mashed potatoes aren’t really that small of a time commitment relative to most things I eat, but I never buy the pre-made stuff or the dry stuff because it’s one of those convenience items the food processing companies have not got even within a country mile of being edible. So mashed potatoes get served at my house for large gatherings, otherwise I get them when I’m going to a large gathering or at a restaurant.
