I find frozen fries from the grocery store that are either air fried or deep fried are pretty good. My fries from scratch have always been disappointing or an ordeal.
Oh my God fuck cinnamon rolls and I love them. If any recipe involves a suggestion for getting unscented non waxed floss just to cut the shapes something is wrong with the level of effort they expect from me.
These are great, done them about 10 times now, realized I didn’t hate making cinnamon buns I just hated the recipes. I dunno what it is with the standard “just like grandma’s” cinnamon bun recipes but it seems like an excuse for making it overly complicated.
The date puree for the filling I make extra and use it as a spread, so good. It’s still a process but it’s not a lot of work at once and cleans easy. The creator of this recipe is really good at teaching the indicators and not just measurements which is why I love this one in particular.
Never made any before but broth doesn’t seem worth it unless you make a big batch, even then I don’t have the room for a big ass pot or a gallon of broth in my fridge/freezer.
Beef/chicken/vegi stock, totally. I have to drive 65 miles to the closest store that sells pork stock, but I can get pork bones from my local butcher, so it’s absolutely worth it to make my own pork stock for home made hot and sour soup.
There was a Chinese restaurant in town when I was growing up that used pork stock and I’ve never had hot and sour soup as good as his. Sadly he retired in 2015 and shut down the restaurant.
I just don’t get enough scraps for how much I cook with stock. I’ll have a couple ziplocks of bones and veg and roast them, then boil, deglaze the roasting pans into the pot, boil, boil, reduce, reduce… great now I can make… a few servings of soup, a cup of concentrate for sauces.
My broth/stock hack is to just get a bulk canister of dehydrated stock powder marketed to restaurants, you can find perfectly acceptable quality-wise for any use at home and its consistent. I do save things for making soups but come on… you’re not gonna get a quantity that’s worth all the effort if you’re just going through the food you’d eat at home. These ingredients how they’re used today were basically invented through restaurant processes where you have large quantities of ingredients and importantly, meat scraps like trimmings bones and carcasses coming through daily on a predictable schedule.
You can get really good powdered stocks too, if they were shitty that would be another story but if you find a restaurant supplier with specialty foods in bulk they likely have a good stock option. I got a pail of dehydrated mushrooms from the same supplier here in Canada and they have the fancy spices and all that too, different saffron varieties even.
There are a couple of things that make this easier :
throw your trimmings from vegetables into freezer bags. Then freeze them until you have a day to make broth. Onion peels color broth, so don’t forget to save those.
concentrate the broth. Once you have the flavor you like, strain out the chunks and put it back on a simmer until there’s 1/4 to 1/2 the volume.
pour the concentrated broth into muffin tins and freeze. Pop them out and throw them in a freezer bag. You now have individually portioned condensed broth that you can throw in whatever you’re cooking.
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
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.
I 100% endorse this comment and am glad to see someone here representing. Anyone who says store bought pirogi’s are almost as good has not had good homemade ones. They are next level.
I don’t think anyone thinks store bought pierogi are as good as homemade, just that they’re so labor intensive that the store bought still have their place, being not as good, but still good…and the increase in quality to do homemade is real…but not worth the fuss to make one meal of them.
It’s absolutely one of those “get the family together once a year and make zillions of them as a social event” type things.
My dad used to get together with a few buddies to make homemade sauerkraut each year and he often said that for the production, for a single meal, just buy it from the store…but as an excuse to hang out with old friends, catch up, tell off color jokes, and drink cheap beer for a few hours each year, it was totally worth it to make homemade.
Baklava. I love it. When my aunts make it it's always amazing. But holy crap if it isn't the most tedious, fiddly, obnoxious stuff to make. And that's if you're not also making your own phyllo dough... all like six miles of it that goes in a batch one vapor thin layer at a time.
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.
A lot of French cuisine. Not talking about laminated dough here which I’ve done many times. More so the complete modern French meal involving multiple reductions and real demiglace and all the techniques that seem to require a full restaurant process. It’s the one style of food I will go to a restaurant and happily pay for once in a while, I understand why it’s expensive to make and respect the skill it takes.
The other style I food I do this with is the very opposite, shitty fast food I can’t make at home.
I don’t have enough meat scraps and carcasses coming through to make proper demi-glace or stock in the quantity I use so I prefer a dehydrated powder used in restaurant service for home use. My scraps usually end up in a single soup recipe.
And yeah I love making French stews and all that, and I make components of French meals, but I’m talking like a full contemporary French menu from appetizer to dessert. To me that’s a very simple menu, some basic ingredients of exceptional quality, each prepared in a way that makes them taste as good as they can using techniques it takes a lot of experience to get good at, with some experimental or playful element that isn’t too pretentious, then plated and presented in a creative way. That type of meal I will gladly pay for because it’s almost the fact someone else has imagined it and made it real that makes it worth it, like I wanna see what kind of tricks they’re doing that I wouldn’t have thought to do. Not only that but everything has to come together perfectly for it to work, and even if I know I can technically do it all, can I do it all at once by myself as a home cook? That’s why I respect the restaurant process for this style of food.
100%. I’m still going to TRY making homemade for a challenge eventually, but when Costco sells perfectly good ones… Why would I make them other than as a project?
Was gonna throw Dominique Ansel’s crepe process up, it’s what I use now. Grew up making crepes this way with my Mennonite grandma (minus the pan caramel), but the way he mixes the dough is a lot smarter to not have any lumps.
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
I agree a lot of commercial corn tortillas are not good. I particularly don’t like the fake-soft ones that have dough conditioners and preservatives for no reason. But with as much cooking as I do, I can’t bring myself to make tortillas when I make masa - I always end up doing pupusas, arepas or tamales. My main use of corn tortillas is enchiladas casserole style so homemade ones are kind of pointless since they 75% disintegrate.
Yup I can’t find anything in the stores that compares and I don’t mind making them. Really only do this in the summer when there’s some garden ingredients though, with a ground meat or bean sauce for protein.
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.
Croissants. Only really good when an independent coffee shop makes someone come in at 4am to start making them. Even the industrial ones at the big chains or supermarkets are pretty meh and it’s way too complex and time consuming to do myself but made right they are one of the best foods.
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.
Cooking is one of those things you have to do at least twice a day so I can’t understand not taking the time to learn unless you live in New York City and only have a hot plate or something.
Because you don’t have to do it twice a day. We live in a society of people with lots of skills so having others that handle the cooking and you handle some other important beneficial task would be fine.
And then to fill space between wanting to eat what everyone else is having, using preserved or easy to eat items at home would fill the gap. That would be a rational society though. But we all need to be individually independent.
Now I dont “love” them as a standalone but I do a few really nice loaded versions for catering family events. I tried to “elevate” my dishes by making my own and while I could and they were a little better it took half a day and a shitload of mess.
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.
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