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?
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.
Macaroons. I have made them from scratch. I can appreciate the sophisticated sublime expression of culinary caution it takes to split egg white, whip them until hard peaks, and then gently and precisely fold in the other ingredients to get the flavor you are after… But holy hell is it tedious with lots of potential for failure most of the way.
Alternatively, making cinnamon rolls from scratch. Not because it’s hard, just because it takes too long. I believe the recipe I was using allowed the dough to rise three separate times. Simple enough to make, but planning ahead for them to be breakfast is a 16:00 the previous day commitment.
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?
French Fries. For those who don’t know, when starting with a potato, you have to fry them twice. Once at a low temp to cook through, then again at a high temp to crisp up and brown. The frozen fries at the grocery have already had the first fry.
The double frying is just too much effort when the frozen stuff is just as good, even in an air fryer. So long as they’re hot, the drive thru can compete with anything you make at home.
I used to feel the same way about egg rolls, but the product you get from scratch is superior to frozen or even take out.
I’d rather make Kenji’s crispy potatoes instead now. You add baking soda and boil potatoes for 10 mins, it get the outside super mushy, you toss in a bowl with oil and they get covered in this potato paste, then oven high heat until cwispy.
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.
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.
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.
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