What's a food you love, that isn't worth making from scratch?

Puff pastry. Never, ever try to make puff pastry at home, it takes forevee, vut xosts like $5 at the shops for a big packet of it

There is something better than a robot, it’s the supermarket. Never ever am I making puff pastry again.

Baklava is my answer here. That shit is so good but i don't have the patience to make it at home.

There's a machine doing all the rolling out to specific thicknesses that's used in bakeries

I've always liked morrocan pancakes, which are also a layered type of food, so decided to make them myself one day. So much much work for something that doesn't taste at least half as good as the ones from the bakery... Never again I told myself!

Store bought laminated dough is perfectly fine and freezes well. I don't mind making it because I find it's just a few minutes every so often, but I was lucky enough to learn the technique such that I don't have to think about it. Use case for making your own is you can use a specific flour or butter and fresh baked pastry is the best.

I spent 2 days cooking my first ramen broth, the tare, the marinated eggs and the garlic oil. It's definitely a case of tripling the batch and freeze it because it takes a lot of work regardless of the quantity.

I'd say a lot of my favorite Asian dishes follow this pattern. Most of them are pretty challenging to recreate due to the amount of ingredients and types of cooking involved. Guess there's a reason they taste so good

Agreed.

My gf and I love ramen and looked into making it at home. I'm the cook of the two of us but she's happy to assist.

...by step 15 of just the broth, and not even halfway through that, I just looked at her and said, "We're not doing this."

You are talking about noodles? lol

Thanks for being honest with us.

Ramen is easy to make, assuming you don't prep anything and don't want the soy eggs then you can make it easily in 15 min

Even I can make crepes lol. Have one of those small pans. Make the batter, open the butter, get cracking.

I have a mental block against making things one by one that have like 20 calories in them.

Brain says small things bad unless can make a million at a time.

And yeah screw making those things from scratch.

I was surprised by this too! I mean I can understand thinking that crepes will be hard because they’re pretty dainty and might be delicate, but they’re surprisingly easy to do.

Do you means from absolute scratch? Here in the Netherlands it is common to buy a can of pre-made dough for croissants. You have to roll and bake them yourself, and adding some egg is also a great idea. But it is technically not entirely from scratch.

They taste way better than the pre-baked ones that you have to re-heat. Absolutely worth the minimal effort.

I usually end up with sushi taco if I try to roll.

Chirashi is valid, yo.

Sashimi, bowl of rice, fish on top, add nori and sesame seed with pickled ginger on the side.

Poke.

This 100%…

It is so expensive/time consuming/finicky for a product that best case scenario is comparable to store bought.

That seems like one of those cases where the production is only worth it if it's a group/family tradition to get together and enjoy everyone's company while you do it.

Like...no part of my family makes baklava, but if I had a friend whose Greek or Turkish family met up once a year and made it, I would love to come help, as much for the experience as to learn about how to make it.

In my area where I grew up (if not my actual family) that food is pierogi: families will get together and make massive quantities of pierogi, usually with the grandmas of the families directing the process. Everyone goes home with dozens and dozens for the freezer.

From what I gather, it's not worth making like...one dozen for a meal, but if you're going to go through the process, you might as well make hundreds.

I have a mental block against things that need to be made one by one and are like 20 calories.

I want lots of food if I do things one by one.

I literally made 15 10-inch crepes for my family this morning. Using 2 pans it took about 30-40 minutes. Made some raspberry sauce before getting the crepes going. All told, the whole process took less than an hour and was awesome.

I grew up making crepes, or whatever the Mennonite equivalent is, and it's one of the easiest things in the world to me. I have a ziplock full of crepes in my freezer right now.

Cottage cheese and bessensap crepes <3

How simpler could something be

I do wonder this a lot on Lemmy

Ugh yes.

Also some of that stuff is more expensive to make at home.

I agree with everything on your list except the fried rice. True, If you're trying to recreate the take away recipe exactly from scratch you're going to have a bad time. But, with a big pan (if you don't have a wok) that you can get real hot it's just a leftovers dish. Leftover rice, leftover protein, frozen veggies, egg, vegetable oil, and soy sauce. It's not usually worth my time unless I already have the leftovers. The hardest part is not over loading your pan with ingredients or oil. You've also got to have everything ready when you start because it all comes together very fast if the pan is hot enough. Sure, I probably still can't beat the economy of scale of the restaurant, but the point is that I'm using up my own leftovers instead of throwing them out.

I really tried but I just can't cook it right. Those youtube chefs videos make it look so easy and make a lot less to clean up than I do.

In the same line, gnocchi.

Sometimes brain say making gnocchi is no big deal.

Other times, grill cheese too much.

Gods! Making it from raw pumpkin takes so fucking long. You can get rid of the strings, but you're still going to be putzing with it forever. I don't like wasting food, so I end up doing it every Halloween, but if I'm doing pumpkin recipes any other time of year, and that has run out, I'm buying canned.

I swear, every year I have an argument with myself to just throw the scraped out stuff in the yard for the birds. They end up getting the jack o lanterns anyway so what's the big deal? But both sets of my grandparents grew up in the depression, so wasting anything is kinda impossible lol.

Yes to pumpkin pie filling. I should mail you some Lakeshore, better than Libby's.

The store bought pie dough isn't vegetarian because it's made with lard. I learned that when I served a pie to some vegetarian friends.

Yeah I make a lot of bread but croissants are a whole other level of complicated.

Not to mention that seeing how much butter goes into them would probably make me not want to eat them.

This is like a lot of pastry that uses laminated dough, having them fresh out of the oven as intended is completely different than supermarket. I dunno what process you were using but there's some easier ones and I find they all freeze incredibly well. Once I froze a few full muffin trays of kouign amann to bring somewhere and popped them in an oven, turned out perfect.

IMO homemade ice cream is primarily for making flavors you can't get otherwise.

I grew up on a farm and we used to make homemade butter. I've lived off the farm for more than 20 years and I have not made butter since I left. The minor difference in cost is simply not worth the effort.

You can use a stand mixer, btw. Only really worth it for compound butter though, IMO.

Cultered butter is amazing, and it's easy to churn in a stand mixer.

Same with ice cream. An ice cream maker makes the difference.

I beat whipped cream by hand once. Once.

Homemade ice cream is worth it if you have the equipment for it, by which I mostly mean the actual churning machine. All the custard and stuff is a lot fiddlier if you don't have a stand mixer or a family member to mix for you, but it's still doable.

Gotta disagree on the pierogi front. I don't make them often, but homemade is so much better than the boxed stuff that occasionally making a huge batch and freezing a bunch is totally worth it.

Raviolis were worth it when I was making a huge huge amount and then freezing bags of them. Then over the course of months could just eat them whenever! For a single meal? No, terrible

Homemade pasta is indescribably better. If you get a pasta maker, it's not even that hard. Just a bit time consuming. And it's sooooo yummy.

I tried tortillini once, they turned out worse than the frozen kind at the store (I took too long and my dough dried out). Never again.

The wife and I will do dumplings every once in a while, but it's definitely not worth the trouble unless we do a couple hundred at once.

I've got to disagree. When I make it, it tastes so much richer than the more quickly made stuff you can get at any restaurant. The two don't even compare.

Edit: Even more so, bo kho. The homemade stuff takes me about 14 hours for a big batch with lots of leftovers. I can't even bother eating the stuff made at restaurants where they cut corners and don't simmer all day.

If you've got a pressure cooker you can make pho ga (chicken pho) in under 30 minutes and it's almost as good as beef in my opinion. Also way cheaper to make than beef pho.

I used to think this until I spent a month tinkering with different recipes and ideas to make a good "cheater pho". Pho that doesn't take 1 day to make yet gets about 90% of the tastes of a great pho. I think i succeeded but it's probably basphamy to some people.

I found the food networks recipe to be a great starting place if you want to give it a shot.

Can you share the recipe please?

I disagree on this one, corn tortillas are really simple if you have a press. The dough is literally just mix masa and water. And to cook them, you just put it on a hot surface for 30 seconds. Meanwhile corn tortillas from the store are always so dry and tasteless, they're rarely worth buying

Part corn part wheat is the best tortilla, but I can't buy them near me so i make them sometimes.

Honestly, you could probably make loaded hash browns and just make them slightly smaller and it would be pretty awesome. But I do agree that I'm not a big fan of the soak time for potatoes and getting them to bond and cook right.

Honestly it's the price that makes jarred sauce not worth it for me. They've gotten ridiculous.

Hours? Literally takes half an hour and you can just leave it donits own thing while its working in the pot lol

I learned from America's Test Kitchen to look at the ingredients. If the first ingredient is tomato paste or tomato concentrate, pass. If it is tomatoes, it will probably be fine. Although usually this means a more expensive jar, there are plenty of expensive/fancy looking jars that don't pass this test.

That said, Del Grosso's has a premium line with "Aunt Mary Anne's Marinara". It is our go-to and far and away the best I've tried.

I came here to hard disagree, especially with the crepes example, but egg on my face and apologies all around: I am with you regarding spaghetti sauce.

Oh yeah I tried eating some out of the jar and BLEH.

Just more Garlic makes such a difference in most jars.

Italian scratching his head here. I can think of only one particular type of ragu that takes a few hours to make properly and is obviously not what's being discussed here due to jars, doctoring sweating and general confusion.

Mate putting together a tomato sauce from scratch for some spaghetti shouldn't take longer than the time it takes to the water to boil plus the 9 or so minutes that it takes to cook the pasta you are overthinking it

I used to doctor storebought sauces too. Recently though, I've just been buying those cans of cento crushed tomatoes. They're a blank slate, and probably better quality tomatoes too.

Because I'm dumb, do you mean macarons? Or do you actually flavor your macaroons? If you do what flavors do you recommend for them? I assume something tropical to go with the coconut?

You know you can make baked fries right? They are very easy and tasty.

Try letting them soak in water for a while after cutting them. Then dry them off before coating in oil and frying them. We do them in the air fryer that way. Not the same as deep fried but it’s good and close enough for us while being little effort.

For extra yummy at home fried food, mix 4 parts table salt with 1 part MSG and use as fry salt.