For me, crepes ain’t worth the stress to make fresh. Just buy a little pack from store and focus on filling is my go to.
Croissants, or any other layered flaky pastry. Like, there should be a robot for this by now.
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.
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.
Fried chicken.
It’s soo good but not worth the hassle of dealing with all the oil.
Although, I’ve since found that air-fried, if done right, can be just as good.
Oh man same.
Dealing with having to deep fry for a single meal is such a pain.
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Any air fryer method you would recommend?
- Fry at 360⁰F for 12 mins
- Flip them and fry again at 360⁰F for 12 mins
- Flip again and fry for 6 mins at 400⁰F
They should come out super crispy but still very juicy on the inside.The one drawback is that it takes a total of 30 mins and you can only make as much as fits in your frier. You really want to have only one layer of wings and not have them laying on top of each other. My frier is fairly small so it’s not something I can make for a whole bunch of people.
I don’t remember the oil being much of a hassle tbh
Honestly? Ramen. There are way too many ingredients that all needs to be cooked differently, and even the broth itself is a nightmare amount of effort for what you get at the end.
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 don’t know if there is anything special about Ramen broth, but once you get used to the process, homemade bone broth is absolutely worth it.
I get pork knee joints from the Asian market, bake them at about 400 for an hour, and simmer on the stove top for a couple of days. That broth is my winter staple.
Just reading this opened my appetite
It definitely is worth it. You can tune it like you want, it is really more flavourful.
But it does take a lot of time.
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
I made homemade General Tso’s and it is absolutely worth the effort. The recipe I used stayed crispy for days even with sauce on it. I could control the flavor. It was so good.
Can I get that recipe haha
Kenji is king <3
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 can kind of use a simplified method to get a good broth with a pressure cooker, because from what I read, the key to getting something good seems to be a sustained hard boil with lots of collagen and fat on the meat.
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
Then you are not making ramen.
15 minutes? To bake the baking soda maybe
Crepes? Jesus, they’re one of the easiest things you can cook. Anyway, to answer your question: croissants! I’ve made them from scratch before and it definitely wasn’t worth it. Took half a day and weren’t a patch on the real thing
Even I can make crepes lol. Have one of those small pans. Make the batter, open the butter, get cracking.
Let the batter sit for 30 mins in the fridge
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.
A crepe is like 100 calories and you can pour like 5 in less than 10 minutes. But anyway, to reach their own. personally I hate chopping stuff even if it takes 1 minute.
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.
What you describe is not making from scratch at all. Those are premade save the final couple of steps, no different than a frozen pizza from the grocery store. No one gets a frozen pizza and says they made it from scratch.
What do you mean re-heat? Are you heating the ones from the bakery before you eat them? Are they not eaten cold in the Netherlands?
Sushi. I just toss all the ingredients in a bowl and be done with it, instead of bothering to roll.
I usually end up with sushi taco if I try to roll.
Just roll a cone and call it Temaki.
Chirashi is valid, yo.
Sashimi, bowl of rice, fish on top, add nori and sesame seed with pickled ginger on the side.
Poke.
Cheese
This 100%…
It is so expensive/time consuming/finicky for a product that best case scenario is comparable to store bought.
Depends on type. Some cheese is easy to produce. Others require a lot of effort, time, controlled environment, etc.
Squeaky cheese! So damn expensive if your in any other state other than WI…
Squeaky cheese
Didn’t know this was a thing. Niice. One more thing to add to the list of things to try.
Paneer or even better, halloumi?
Paneer I only like homemade, but it’s so easy I hesitate to call it cheese. Pressed curds. Halloumi I don’t like, and what’s funny is I was just thinking today that now that I like swiss I like every cheese in existence but forgot about Halloumi.
Yeah I’ll probably never buy ricotta again after making homemade, unless I was really in a pinch for time I guess. You save a decent chunk of change on home made too. Mozzarella I’d go either way on.
Chinese food. The common fast food type here in the US. Yeah, I can spend a bunch of time, work, and money to make orange chicken, boneless spare ribs, crab rangoon, teriyaki, coconut shrimp, and pork fried rice. Or, I can go 5 minutes up the street, and pay my favorite restaurant $20 for a big plate with all of that, with absolutely no work on my part, and it all tastes way better.
Ugh yes.
Also some of that stuff is more expensive to make at home.
First time, can be. After that not so much. I’m cheating making my own five spice and having about a decade and a half experience in Chinese kitchens, so I know their recipes.
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.
leftover rice
I do not know of which you speak
I had to laugh when I read this, since it’s apparently impossible for me to make the correct amount of rice for a meal. I’ve never once in my life not had leftover rice haha.
For me, it usually becomes tomorrow’s breakfast: reheated in the pot on the stove with a bit of water, then put it in a bowl, crack a raw egg on it, and drizzle with soy sauce and sprinkle on a few toasted sesame seeds.
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.
Crepes are stressfull? How simpler could something be?
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.
Have you tried two pans at the same time? Solves the one by one problem quite nicely.
Ehehe that explains it!
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.
Yeah but using pre bought it takes like 3 minutes depending on the filling.
So that’s why brain say bad.
How simpler could something be
I do wonder this a lot on Lemmy
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
Pumpkin pie filling. The real stuff takes forever and it’s stringy. It also doesn’t taste quite the same. Libby does it so well it’s not worth making your own.
My wife says pie dough. Pillsbury’s is almost as good and a lot less effort. I prefer pie dough with a ton more butter but she doesn’t.
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.
Jack o lantern pumpkins are not good for pies, in part because they are too stringy. A sugar pumpkin is the way to go if you want to do it from scratch.
Very true indeed. But sugar pumpkins are horrible for jack o lanterns lol. Well, if you do them the way we do. It’s kind of a big thing for us. We do that fancy shit and have a line of them on the porch. Actually, this year we didn’t go all out and only had five, with only one being fancy.
But if I’m making pumpkin pie filling from scratch, you’re dead on. I’m not messing with scraping one out, I’m just cutting it up, baking it and going from there.
I haven’t bought canned pumpkin in 20 years. It’s not bad to process and freeze it, and with good pie pumpkins, it’s unparalleled. Plus you get home roasted pumpkin seeds as a bonus.
Yes to pumpkin pie filling. I should mail you some Lakeshore, better than Libby’s.
Lakeshore you say.
That’s the one. I also recommend the Weber’s box :)
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.
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.
Pho. I have a killer recipe for the instant pot but it basically works out to the same price as just buying it from our local takeout. And they’re Vietnamese.
Can you share the recipe please?
So sorry, I forgot to reply.
Pho
Ingredients
MEAT:
- 1 packet of oxtail
- 1/2 packet of tendon
- 1 packet of flank (add this when plating up)
- 1 packet of vietnamese meatballs (these cook separately to the other meat)
CHARRED VEG - 1 root of ginger (around 3 inches long), unpeeled, cut in half lengthways
- 1 onion, skinned and cut in half
FLAVORS - 10 pieces of star anise (aniseed)
- 1 tablespoon coriander seed
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 tablespoon salt
- 1 clump of rock sugar
- 6 tablespoons of fish sauce
- MSG (? amount)
TOPPINGS - Fresh Cilatro
- Culantro (sawtooth, big leafy shit)
- Basil
- Green onion
- Lime
- Sliced onions
- Bean sprouts
- Hoisin Sauce
- Sriracha
OTHER - Rice Noodles
Bring a big pot of water to the boil and drop the meat (except the meatballs and flank) into the boiling water. Furiously boil for 10 minutes. Drain and wash the meat under the tap.
Turn on the broiler, put the ginger and onion in, cut side up, until nicely charred.
Fill the instant pot to 1 inch below full line (12 cups/3 quarts or a little more). Add the washed meat (not the meatballs, not the flank) to the water and adjust water if overfilled. Then add the charred veg and the flavor ingredients.
Lid on, pressure cook button and set to 1 hour and 30 minutes. Prep toppings. Add the noodles to cold water and soak for at least 30 minutes. Let the pressure cooker depressurize naturally when done. During this time, prepare a pot of boiling water for the meatballs and noodles.
Once the Instant Pot beeps finished, boil the meatballs in water for 10 minutes. When these are done, remove, and leave the water boiling ready for the noodles. When ready to serve, dip the noodles in the boiling water for 1-2 minutes and remove immediately.
Open Instant Pot and remove meat to cut and plate. Strain the broth. If you have time, strain it a second time through a piece of kitchen towel to remove extra impurities. Return broth pot to Instant Pot and turn to low saute - taste and adjust seasonings as needed.
Plate up the food, starting with noodles, then meat, flank, broth, then toppings and sauce. Get slurpy.
Thanks!
Pretty please.
Attached above!
ty :)
Butter. I churned some once and no. Never again. Also ice cream, for similar reasons. And because we have some ice cream here that’s very nice.
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.
I beat whipped cream by hand once. Once.
Huh. I am the exact opposite, for a small amount I usually don’t want to drag out the mixer, so put metal bowl, whisk, and carton of cream in the freezer for a few minutes then whip some cream. It is a workout but somehow seems easier than mixer. Almost always whip cream by hand.
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.
This is the only reason I will occasionally make butter. To make it from creme fraiche cultured with buttermilk. More flavor.
Ice cream I sometimes make by freezing a mix that includes some booze as antifreeze, then once completely frozen, cut into chunks and whir it in the food processor. Then back into the freezer. That stays pretty nice, is lovely. Started this because one of my (grown) kids is vegan and it works with coconut milk as the cream.
Phở Bo (Vietnamese beef soup). It’s such an amazingly good soup, but the making of it is a multi-step process that takes hours.
https://www.cooking-therapy.com/traditional-vietnamese-pho-recipe/
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.
Tbh, not much.
That being said, spaghetti sauce. Yeah, home made is better, but “doctoring” a jarred sauce gets 95% as good without hours of work. You can’t fix the canned shit, but I’ve not found a jarred sauce that I can’t tweak with fresh herbs and some quickly sweated aromatics and end up with something that people love. It also satisfies my picky ass. Now, I will say that fucking ragu is pretty shit overall, and doctoring it only goes so far. But it is still good enough that making sauce from scratch ain’t happening.
Edit:
There seems to be a lot of range in spaghetti sauce recipes. It’s also important to note that I’m not talking about marinara.
So, the real time involved is split between prep and simmering.
Here’s how we do it. Remember this is an american talking here, so don’t redirect expect something traditionally Italian. And I’m a southerner that’s mostly german and Scots-Irish, so don’t expect any new York style stuff lol.
You take your tomatoes, skin them however you prefer. I use a quick dip in boiling water, aka blanching.
You give those peeled tomatoes a rough chop into nice size chunks. Now, the kind of tomato matters for that because something like a roma e isn’t gong to need as many chops as a beefsteak. You’d usually be using something like a roma anyway, but if your neighbor drops off a giant bucket of tomatoes, you can only use what you got, you know?
You chop up an onion, maybe two. You mince some garlic, maybe half a bulb if you really like garlic. I love garlic, so I go heavy.
Now, that’s your usual start. Most people in my family don’t add anything else in the way of veggies. Me? I like to char a couple of red or yellow bell peppers, skin them, and get them in there too. If I’m feeling frisky, I might have zucchini, eggplant, or whatever else cut up and ready to add at the appropriate time too, but that’s optional.
You get the onions sweating. While they’re starting, you feet your herbs together. Idgaf about fresh vs dried, each has benefits for flavor, you do what you prefer. I do oregano, basil, marjoram, a little thyme, and that’s it. I’m simple.
A little black pepper, a little salt (you really don’t need much, maybe a teaspoon for a big batch; salt your damn pasta water instead) to taste.
Once the onions are almost ready, I add the peppers since the quick char and steam to peel them tends to get them halfway cooked anyway.
This is around a half hour of work for most people. For me, it’s closer to an hour. Yay disability!
Then you add your tomatoes, herbs, and any optional veggies. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer.
After that, it’s patience. You’re making sure any veggies added are tender, and after that it’s cooking things down and letting the flavors develop. And, I promise you, anything under a half hour of simmering isn’t going to taste right, and will be super runny. You’ll usually have what amounts to chunky tomato water until close to the hour mark. For a big pot (my biggest is 6 quarts, and it starts damn near full when I do it) an hour and a half is bare minimum for the right thickness.
Now, if you’re going to jar that up, you’re done except for that part, which isn’t involved in what I originally said.
If you’re going to add meat, you’ll want to start browning it off about a half hour ahead of when the thickness will be right. You add the cooked meat in and let it simmer for 15 minutes at minimum. Do yourself a favor and deglaze the pan used with a nice, semisweet red wine, add that to the pot and go at least a half hour after adding it.
Now, exactly how long it needs to simmer is variable because you’re dealing with tomatoes, and the water content varies between varieties, time of year, weather conditions, etc. But I’ve never had a full sized batch take less than an hour and a half counting from the initial bring-to-boil stage.
I dunno, maybe there’s time savers I’ve never thought of. Maybe the folks saying it’s a half hour are doing a different version of “from scratch”, or whatever. But that’s how we do it, and it’s pretty much what the typical recipes I’ve seen online do (I went and checked because I wondered if I was crazy lol), plus or minus some details that don’t really change simmer time.
I’ve had some batches need a full two hours of simmering. And, yeah, you don’t have to stand over the pot the whole time, but chances are you’ll still be in the kitchen cleaning, keeping an eye on things stirring occasionally, adding any herbs or spices to adjust taste as it goes, etc. So it isn’t like you can just pop down to the local pub (or equivalent in your location) and go by time alone. You’ll still be in the general vicinity, with the added heat and humidity from cooking.
But that’s why I rarely go from scratch. I can pick up a jar of whatever, add some herbs, extra garlic and/or onions, brown any meat and then the deglaze and be done in under an hour from start to finish, including prep. The taste isn’t the same, nor is the texture, but it’s still yummy.
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.
Hours? Literally takes half an hour and you can just leave it donits own thing while its working in the pot lol
Apparently, either my family recipe is a shit ton more complex than the norm, or in not talking about the same kind of sauce other people are lol.
Also, that includes prep time
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.
I’m the exact opposite on spaghetti sauce. I find an incredible sauce is very easy to make heaps of with San Marzano tomatoes and tastes almost zero effort, just lots of time. But then I have like ten spaghettis’ worth and it’s wrecks shop on any jar sauce!
Honestly it’s the price that makes jarred sauce not worth it for me. They’ve gotten ridiculous.
They have, haven’t they? Mind you everything is getting ridiculous, but still.
I’m a huge fan of Rao’s sauce, but the price jumped from about $4 a jar to $10 last year and I just can’t justify that. I sometimes find it on sale for under $5 and def grab it, but it’s rare these days.
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
Pretty sure they’re talking about the brand Ragu, which is some of the cheapest jarred spaghetti sauce you can get in the US.
That said, toss me one of those easy tasty sauce recipes?
Yeah, I’m talking about the brand ragu.
Also, it seems that my family recipe is more involved than the norm lol
I’m American, and do use jarred sauce if I have it, but more often what I have is tomato paste, a half bottle of wine hanging out in the refrigerator and some garlic or olive oil and butter. Anchovies. Usually have canned peeled tomatoes too, but those do have to cook awhile to taste good.
I guess I don’t set out to replicate jarred sauce, generally speaking, but can quickly dress pasta for supper with something good.
My sauces take a few hours to make, but they’re insanely good.
I made ragu for the first time about a year ago, and it was outstanding. I gotta make some more of that.
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.
Xiao long bao (aka soup dumpling). Also, made from scratch Tonkotsu Ramen.
Tried making them both. So much work.
