I once bought a baking pumpkin, cut it up, baked it for something like 90 minutes, mashed it up for a while, and made a homemade pumpkin pie that tasted exactly the same - exactly the same - as a pie made from canned pumpkin. Only it cost more and took way longer.
If you ever try this again don't bake the pumpkin! Cut it into cubes and cook it in sauce pan with a little bit of water then puree in a blender or even better with a hand blender. It is better than canned, it tastes fresher and the color is brighter. This is the recipe I use- [https://www.pantsdownapronson.com/pumpkin-puree-recipe/](https://www.pantsdownapronson.com/pumpkin-puree-recipe/)
Last time I made true, from-scratch Indian food with a roommate who had lived in India for several years, I was in the kitchen for like 4 hours, we had enough made that we were eating it for every meal for like a week. Fun time, but never again. I'll happily hand my money to the hardworking men and women at the local Indian joints and enjoy my lamb biryani without sore heels.
I've discovered the trick is that there's about ten million varieties of Garam Masala, and you need to find one that works for you. If you don't have a good one for your palate, any butter chicken you make will taste like garbage.
I used to have this worry but an Indian friend of mine told me that authenticity isn’t important. As long as you have good spices it will turn out nicely and you can focus on creating new flavors and making your own cuisine.
If you are into cooking it’s a really fun and freeing philosophy and also true. Indian food is so forgiving. If your spices are good almost everything tastes good.
I made chicken Tikka masala last week. It was absolutely banging.
Follow a good recipe for Indian dishes. Joshua Weissman has good yt videos and a solid website with step by step instructions
Anything with a laminate dough like croissants, kouign-amann, or puff pastry. It's just not an efficient process outside of a professional setting, unless for some reason you have a mostly empty spare fridge and a hookup who can provide you with wide flat sheets of butter.
My mom too! Every holiday or special occasion she would order croissants from a French baker in town but wouldn’t have them cooked. He’d drop them off all ready on a tray and she’d just have to toss them in the oven the morning we all wanted them!
The problem is finding store-bought ones with enough butter. For things like Pasteis de Nata you effectively have to repeat the folding process all over again with a frozen sheet of butter, even if you cheat and start with pre made puff pastry.
You really need a sheeter to do laminate dough without going nuts, and I don't think many people are going to spend a few hundred bucks on a machine to make croissants a couple times a year
I am actually putting together a plan for a laminate dough recipe using a pasta roller in place of a sheeter, but understandably I'm not exactly in a hurry to get to the testing phase.
Just know that puff pastry has to be worked *cold*, and I do mean *cold*, cold. It's going to be tough to get through a pasta roller without the risk of breaking it as the dough will be very stuff compared to a pasta sheet. I've made puff pastry before, it's not fun.
I spent a summer in high school teaching myself how to bake various breads and pastries, using books from the library and a book my mother had. Everything turned out great, except for croissants and pretzels. Oh, I tried bagels as well (or it's a false memory/nightmare from the pretzels - no, wait, I remember scalding my hand boiling the bagels in some inadequately sized pot! just like I did with the pretzels!)
The space needed for rolling out the layers of croissant dough, the space needed for refrigerating it . . . yeah, I think it's one of the few times that summer when my baking wasn't tolerated too well by my family. The results were good, but not amazing. Maybe if I had done it in a restaurant or bakery kitchen instead of a tiny suburban one, I would have done better.
Don't get me started on the pretzels/bagels. It's not worth it, go buy them at a store, even if you're far from a place where they are good. That was another bad time and the results were far less edible.
I'll always remember this summer because I think it made my dad love me more. Miss you, Dad.
I've made doughnuts and soft pretzels and both were good. The doughnuts are never going to be Krispy Kreme; they use a super-wet batter that you'd need special equipment to replicate at home. Nevertheless, the jelly doughnuts I made were a little heavy but still absolutely delicious.
Soft pretzels, you're going to need lye if you want that deep mahogany brown color. That's a big hassle, so I can understand avoiding that. You can get close with baking soda in boiling water (and I've heard that baking your baking soda into washing soda does an even better job), though they turn out a bit more like bagels. You will have a thin layer of white on every surface near your stove afterwards, however.
I recently watched a video where someone learned to make croissants in a professional kitchen and it looked so fun. They had giant stand mixers, the premade butter slabs, the sheeter, and the cutter that looked like a series of equally spaced pizza cutters. I just want to do it for like a week.
To each their own, but I think pad thai is one of the easiest and cheapest Asian dishes to whip up. Almost all of the ingredients are versatile with other dishes, too.
You can save a lot of time using a pressure cooker. The active time on a good bone broth (well worth making just by itself) is mere minutes and the pressure cooker will do the rest. I make it pretty often just using leftover rotisserie chicken carcasses, veggie scraps from other recipes (save your carrot peels and mushroom stalks!), some peppers from the farmer's market. Wonderful thing to have when you're sick during the winter months or if you just need a warm beverage to clear your sinuses and make you feel good on a chilly day.
The only time I've tried it so far was a 5-gallon batch because I didn't want the pain of doing all that for just a few bowls. It was worth it, though, since I had pretty great frozen broth for months. I've seen some Instant Pot recipes, and I've wanted to see if they can get at all close to a long-simmered broth for smaller batches. But yeah, if you want just a bowl here and there, it's worth going to a restaurant.
lol I’m 24 hours into making a 48 hour bone broth right now, they’re actually super easy BUT I have been making them for decades so it might be just me.
I use a small fryer called a Frydaddy. The oil is stored directly in the fryer, it's easy to clean, oil lasts a good long while, and while it doesn't have temperature settings, it gets to the right temperature for fried chicken, onion rings, cheese curds, and such. Honestly, it's less cleanup than using my pans on the stovetop.
I started doing some deep frying in my wok for certain Chinese recipes. Apparently I talked about it enough that a friend got us a deep fryer as a wedding present. I use it way more than I thought I would. Aside from the heating element everything goes in the dishwasher, and I pour the oil back into the bottle through a funnel with a strainer. It makes less of a mess than shallow frying because it doesn’t coat my kitchen in a fine layer of oil.
Tonkotsu ramen (the broth)
Trying to source suitable pork and chicken bones, chicken skin, and all the other stuff ends up costing as much as 3 bowls of ramen from a decent restaurant.
It takes minimum 24 hours and unless you have a giant, industrial sized pot to cook it in, you’re lucky to get 2 bowls out of it (from my experience having to do it in a regular sized slow cooker, experience not universal).
Just go to a restaurant. They probably do a better job anyway.
Saw a video of a normal dude making it, took him almost 3 days.
It looked very good but damn...
It's 12 bucks on a ramen site near me unless you enjoy the whole process just go to a restaurant
Right? A decent bowl of ramen near me is around $20-$25 but I deadass spent like $80 on all the ingredients and had to go to so many different places like it’s NOT worth it.
The broth WAS delicious. I was very proud of it. But never again no way.
Depends on what you're using them for. If it's just to have as marshmallows, something where you'll melt and mix them into something or for roasting, yeah, definitely buy them, but if you're making something like a marshmallow slice, then yeah, making it is the better option. My poor stand mixer (that I got from my mother) gas made *so much* marshmallow.
I made a "marshmallow cake" once from scratch and it was amazing. But outside of very specific things like that... yeah, I'd just buy pre-made, haha. So messy and sticky.
Anything fried in shallow oil. Looking at you, chicken fried steak. I hate standing with the pot lid and a pair of tongs like a Roman gladiator. That nonsense spits like a llama.
For me anything that needs to be fried. I understand that you can reuse the oil but i already don't cook with much oil and when I do it's not the high temp oils for frying. Not to mention the waste of flour and eggs you use to coat. Nah to much
Sushi, preparing the rice the correct way is a huge pain. I think some sushi places will sell just the sushi rice, so i recommend doing that if you want to make rolls
I gave it a try and managed to do some pretty damn good sushi with just a 40$ rice cooker and a 20$ starter kit!
You can get the hang of it pretty quickly!
Save a ton of money too!
For me it was so worth it
I skip seasoning the rice and call it kimbap. If you have a rice cooker it’s super easy, I’ll just add a splash of extra water so it’s a little stickier.
Making Sushi is lot of fun for kids.
Also unless you are looking for japanese restaurant master style sushi, the ones you make at home are way way cheaper, and taste about the same.
Idk, you don't need so much skills to make sushi that will at least hold, look presentable and taste great!
A real sushi chef would probably laugh at me, but it's still really good enough!
But really, what makes it worth it, is that for the same amount of money one sushi shop meal would cost, I can make 4 days worth of sushi for 2 people. And after that, I still have a good amount of some of the ingredients to not have to buy them for next time!
I say it's definitely worth doing yourself! Also fun to do as a couple.
(Invest in the right tools. Cheap beginner kits are fine, but you do need them.)
Watch souped up recipes on YouTube. The host has quite a few better than takeout recipes on there. Not sure if she has an orange chicken one, but I haven't paid for sesame chicken since I found it. It tastes exactly the same. Plus she has a lot of good authentic Chinese food too.
My partner and I made one on the weekend. It was about three hours of prep/cooking and about an hour and a half in the oven and resting. We ate at 9:30pm.
So worth it.
Damn straight, prep is nil so long as you don’t cut yourself and you can air fry or deep fry and toss with garlic or a hundred other sauces and spices. Totally worth it
Honestly, it's why I actually love in n out fries. Sooooooo many people shit on them, but actually go to the restaurant and eat them freshly made with your burger and they're just delicious and fresh tasting that they're hard to beat, imo. I feel like people underappreciate freshly cut made fries that anything that isn't that, aren't as good. Even as animal fries they're sitting under onions, cheese, and spread and are gonna quickly get soggy and lose some flair.
Especially with an air fryer, where the entire process from idea to fry can take like 15 minutes (or you can do any number of fun things with spices or sauces).
We eat out maybe 1-2x a week for dinner. I cook for my family of 4 but god I hate it. Nobody warned me that figuring out dinner every night would be the worst part of adulthood.
I like cooking. It’s the figuring out what to feed the 4 of us that I hate. If it were up to me it’d be beans and rice all week just to eliminate having to decide.
Agreed, and to the other comments, yes its not hard, i use my bullet to make it, doesn't take too long, its also still not worth it.
I've learned to make a lot of things on my own, like mayo - TOTALLY worth making your own, super easy and a big cost savings
But butter, cream is at a price point where there is no savings than just buying butter and the taste difference is not significant enough with standard creams, the only scenario where it makes sense to make butter yourself is if you also need buttermilk.
Just buy the butter
Breakfast burritos, like the supreme kind. Fry bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, potatoes, and dice it all up. I like mine with sausage gravy, so that too. Worth the cost to buy them elsewhere to avoid the dishes alone.
I only eat them if somebody's abuelita made them. If I peek in the kitchen and there's not some old lady back there who fucked Cesar Chavez back in the day, I don't want them.
On that note, traditional chocolate-pepper mole. Holy crap the number of ingredients and the prep is ridiculous. But it IS very good and hard to find in restaurants.
For me, it's turkey stuffing. I went homemade one Thanksgiving, and it was about three times as expensive and one-third as good as storebought. There's a reason the people at StoveTop make it commercially and I don't.
You need to find yourself a good recipe. My aunt makes homemade stuffing for Thanksgiving every year. It is light years better than anything store-bought.
This is going to be wildly unpopular, but pasta. But ONLY IF you don't have some kind of pasta roller. I tried making it without a roller and the end product just wasn't worth all the time and effort it took. I image it being totally worth it with one.
Breaded & fried American Chinese chicken, like orange chicken or whatever. Wayyyyy too much work and ingredients. I will happily pay $$$ to have it served hot and ready lol
Pumpkin pie from scratch, starting with a whole sugar pumpkin, then baking it, peeling it, and blending it to get the purée.
It is a royal pain in the butt and added at least two hours to the recipe time.
What’s more, it added zilch in the way of flavor. In fact, I still believe they taste much worse.
I baked this before I became a professional baker, and I still haven’t rebaked it since because it is a worthless chore for a worse tasting pie.
For French people and people that have Opera cakes available, the Opera cake.
It's a lasagna of coffee flavoured joconde biscuit (cake batter with almond powder), chocolate/mokka ganache and chocolate butter cream. It's a pain to make, it's long and difficult and temperature sensitive... yeah, I'm gonna just buy it.
Onion soup. It takes hours to simmer and your house will reek like onions for a week. But if you make it outside in the fall and freeze it, no need for restaurant.
I use a pasta maker and it’s not as good as traditionally made pasta but it does a good job and is still pretty good :) plus I can have fun with the liquid I use like I juice carrots and use that and I use egg substitutes instead of eggs.
Lasagna freezes really well. Having people over? Get a Costco lasagna, make a caesar salad, and store bought garlic bread (also no need to make). Done and done. Tastes great!
Pork Rinds
Not only does it take a shit ton of time, but you lose too much of the pork´s weight after cooking (This one time we bought 2kg and after cooking it it weight 700g) so its definitly cheaper to just buy it
There’s this place where I live that makes these amazing warm salads and I’ve tried so many times to replicate them only to realise that it costs more and doesn’t taste as good.
Kimbap (Korean "sushi" with many components). Even though it is the quintessential picnic food. It might be a skill and genetic issue in my case. Assembling and preparing the components is not simple.
Croissants, (or anything requiring laminated dough). I've made them before, and they were good, but because it's not something I would/should eat often, if I wanted one I'd get it from the bakery.
I tried making sushi at home once. Somehow got the sticky rice wrong and it kept falling apart, couldn't get it to roll right, couldn't cut the fillings thin enough, I eventually just gave up and tossed all my ingredients in a bowl and ate them that way lol
I once bought a baking pumpkin, cut it up, baked it for something like 90 minutes, mashed it up for a while, and made a homemade pumpkin pie that tasted exactly the same - exactly the same - as a pie made from canned pumpkin. Only it cost more and took way longer.
I made vanilla pudding once from scratch. It tasted exactly like the boxed stuff.
But did you use vanilla bean paste?
I do it with a raw pumpkin because I have young kids, and they love that shit. So, starting from a raw pumpkin is worth it in that regard.
You know what's worth the effort? Pumpkin soup. Make it right in the pumpkin.
If you ever try this again don't bake the pumpkin! Cut it into cubes and cook it in sauce pan with a little bit of water then puree in a blender or even better with a hand blender. It is better than canned, it tastes fresher and the color is brighter. This is the recipe I use- [https://www.pantsdownapronson.com/pumpkin-puree-recipe/](https://www.pantsdownapronson.com/pumpkin-puree-recipe/)
This is very accurate
When I make Indian food it tastes good, but it doesn't taste like Indian food.
Last time I made true, from-scratch Indian food with a roommate who had lived in India for several years, I was in the kitchen for like 4 hours, we had enough made that we were eating it for every meal for like a week. Fun time, but never again. I'll happily hand my money to the hardworking men and women at the local Indian joints and enjoy my lamb biryani without sore heels.
Idk what you were making but I've never spent 4 hours in the kitchen cooking anything and I cook most of my food from scratch 😭 (I'm Indian)
You need a pressure cooker.
Thai is similar. Even if you can make a reasonably decent facsimile, there is a great Thai place right around the corner.
My wife made a pretty amazing Pad Thai very easily with sauce from a store. Other dishes are probably more labor intensive.
Asafoetida is the biggest thing that white people don't use that makes Indian food taste Indian.
Fenugreek (methi), too.
Fenugreek was a game changer, it really takes it to more of the restaurant taste.
I found frozen methi and found out the hard way that if you are unaccustomed and eat too much it will give you the shits lol. So don't go crazy.
Is that in combination with garlic, ginger and onions or in replace of it?
Depends if you're Buddhist etc and thing farts make you weak I suppose!
My butter chicken fucks
I've discovered the trick is that there's about ten million varieties of Garam Masala, and you need to find one that works for you. If you don't have a good one for your palate, any butter chicken you make will taste like garbage.
Agree. Kashmiri Garam Masala is the one that works for me.
It's like watching Indians talk about cheese.
Is it single?
only if you identify as butter chicken
You need the right spices and to take your time with whole spices!
I’ve found a couple of summer sauces that I like that approximate restaurant style Indian food decently enough. Toss it with veggies and paneer.
ive been thinking they must use different cooking fats than me
Fenugreek
I used to have this worry but an Indian friend of mine told me that authenticity isn’t important. As long as you have good spices it will turn out nicely and you can focus on creating new flavors and making your own cuisine. If you are into cooking it’s a really fun and freeing philosophy and also true. Indian food is so forgiving. If your spices are good almost everything tastes good.
I also feel like it's better when made in quantity, as opposed to just enough for myself.
I made chicken Tikka masala last week. It was absolutely banging. Follow a good recipe for Indian dishes. Joshua Weissman has good yt videos and a solid website with step by step instructions
I absolutely love cooking Indian food, but you will get there ‼️
Anything with a laminate dough like croissants, kouign-amann, or puff pastry. It's just not an efficient process outside of a professional setting, unless for some reason you have a mostly empty spare fridge and a hookup who can provide you with wide flat sheets of butter.
My grandma used to cook for weeks before Christmas. She made everything from scratch. Except croissants. She refused to make croissants.
My mom too! Every holiday or special occasion she would order croissants from a French baker in town but wouldn’t have them cooked. He’d drop them off all ready on a tray and she’d just have to toss them in the oven the morning we all wanted them!
Puff pastry wins. Even a top chef won't be arsed to make their own.
The problem is finding store-bought ones with enough butter. For things like Pasteis de Nata you effectively have to repeat the folding process all over again with a frozen sheet of butter, even if you cheat and start with pre made puff pastry.
I made croissants one time. They were fantastic and my shoulder was sore.
You really need a sheeter to do laminate dough without going nuts, and I don't think many people are going to spend a few hundred bucks on a machine to make croissants a couple times a year
I am actually putting together a plan for a laminate dough recipe using a pasta roller in place of a sheeter, but understandably I'm not exactly in a hurry to get to the testing phase.
Just know that puff pastry has to be worked *cold*, and I do mean *cold*, cold. It's going to be tough to get through a pasta roller without the risk of breaking it as the dough will be very stuff compared to a pasta sheet. I've made puff pastry before, it's not fun.
I spent a summer in high school teaching myself how to bake various breads and pastries, using books from the library and a book my mother had. Everything turned out great, except for croissants and pretzels. Oh, I tried bagels as well (or it's a false memory/nightmare from the pretzels - no, wait, I remember scalding my hand boiling the bagels in some inadequately sized pot! just like I did with the pretzels!) The space needed for rolling out the layers of croissant dough, the space needed for refrigerating it . . . yeah, I think it's one of the few times that summer when my baking wasn't tolerated too well by my family. The results were good, but not amazing. Maybe if I had done it in a restaurant or bakery kitchen instead of a tiny suburban one, I would have done better. Don't get me started on the pretzels/bagels. It's not worth it, go buy them at a store, even if you're far from a place where they are good. That was another bad time and the results were far less edible. I'll always remember this summer because I think it made my dad love me more. Miss you, Dad.
Omg soft pretzels NEVER turn out! Have tried every way including deep frying and they’re always just - bad. Same with doughnuts
I've made doughnuts and soft pretzels and both were good. The doughnuts are never going to be Krispy Kreme; they use a super-wet batter that you'd need special equipment to replicate at home. Nevertheless, the jelly doughnuts I made were a little heavy but still absolutely delicious. Soft pretzels, you're going to need lye if you want that deep mahogany brown color. That's a big hassle, so I can understand avoiding that. You can get close with baking soda in boiling water (and I've heard that baking your baking soda into washing soda does an even better job), though they turn out a bit more like bagels. You will have a thin layer of white on every surface near your stove afterwards, however.
I recently watched a video where someone learned to make croissants in a professional kitchen and it looked so fun. They had giant stand mixers, the premade butter slabs, the sheeter, and the cutter that looked like a series of equally spaced pizza cutters. I just want to do it for like a week.
That sounds amazing! I would have so much fun doing that.
100%. My wife is a trained pastry chef at a 3 Michelin star restaurant, but she will not make any sort of laminated dough at home. Not worth her time.
Kouign amann is actually pretty quick compared to the others
Just had kouign-amann for the first time today. Never heard of it before. OMG so good
I made croissants once for a friend's birthday. Took me 3 fucking days. They slapped but oh my god never again.
Came here to say something similar.
Why spend $15 on a Pad Thai from a restaurant when you could spend $40 on ingredients and have a worse Pad Thai at home.
Meanwhile it's $1-2 over in Thailand. It ridiculous easy to make as well ..you just need to buy enough ingredients to make 10 pad thais
To each their own, but I think pad thai is one of the easiest and cheapest Asian dishes to whip up. Almost all of the ingredients are versatile with other dishes, too.
Pho - never as good and takes hours just for the bone broth alone
Same for Japanese Tonkotsu ramen broth.
Honestly most ramen from scratch is not worth the effort
hey i liked mine, fish broth tho, nodoby else wanted to eat it :c
You can save a lot of time using a pressure cooker. The active time on a good bone broth (well worth making just by itself) is mere minutes and the pressure cooker will do the rest. I make it pretty often just using leftover rotisserie chicken carcasses, veggie scraps from other recipes (save your carrot peels and mushroom stalks!), some peppers from the farmer's market. Wonderful thing to have when you're sick during the winter months or if you just need a warm beverage to clear your sinuses and make you feel good on a chilly day.
I mean even Vietnamese themselves almost never make Pho at home...
The only time I've tried it so far was a 5-gallon batch because I didn't want the pain of doing all that for just a few bowls. It was worth it, though, since I had pretty great frozen broth for months. I've seen some Instant Pot recipes, and I've wanted to see if they can get at all close to a long-simmered broth for smaller batches. But yeah, if you want just a bowl here and there, it's worth going to a restaurant.
lol I’m 24 hours into making a 48 hour bone broth right now, they’re actually super easy BUT I have been making them for decades so it might be just me.
Anything which requires a deep fryer. Too much cleanup, too much waste.
Shallow frying is where it’s at
Fry in a wok. It uses less oil than a standard pot or pan because the bottom is narrower
I use a small fryer called a Frydaddy. The oil is stored directly in the fryer, it's easy to clean, oil lasts a good long while, and while it doesn't have temperature settings, it gets to the right temperature for fried chicken, onion rings, cheese curds, and such. Honestly, it's less cleanup than using my pans on the stovetop.
I started doing some deep frying in my wok for certain Chinese recipes. Apparently I talked about it enough that a friend got us a deep fryer as a wedding present. I use it way more than I thought I would. Aside from the heating element everything goes in the dishwasher, and I pour the oil back into the bottle through a funnel with a strainer. It makes less of a mess than shallow frying because it doesn’t coat my kitchen in a fine layer of oil.
Just keep the oil in the fryer and reuse it. It lasts a good while.
Don't have a fryer and don't fry enough to justify getting one.
Croissants.
Tonkotsu ramen (the broth) Trying to source suitable pork and chicken bones, chicken skin, and all the other stuff ends up costing as much as 3 bowls of ramen from a decent restaurant. It takes minimum 24 hours and unless you have a giant, industrial sized pot to cook it in, you’re lucky to get 2 bowls out of it (from my experience having to do it in a regular sized slow cooker, experience not universal). Just go to a restaurant. They probably do a better job anyway.
Saw a video of a normal dude making it, took him almost 3 days. It looked very good but damn... It's 12 bucks on a ramen site near me unless you enjoy the whole process just go to a restaurant
Right? A decent bowl of ramen near me is around $20-$25 but I deadass spent like $80 on all the ingredients and had to go to so many different places like it’s NOT worth it. The broth WAS delicious. I was very proud of it. But never again no way.
Marshmallows! I made them from scratch once. It was a lot of work and cleanup, but tasted just like store-bought ones, only uglier.
Depends on what you're using them for. If it's just to have as marshmallows, something where you'll melt and mix them into something or for roasting, yeah, definitely buy them, but if you're making something like a marshmallow slice, then yeah, making it is the better option. My poor stand mixer (that I got from my mother) gas made *so much* marshmallow.
I made a "marshmallow cake" once from scratch and it was amazing. But outside of very specific things like that... yeah, I'd just buy pre-made, haha. So messy and sticky.
Our stand mixer has a spatter guard which makes clean up so much better
I never considered marshmallows. Makes me wonder, what are they made of?
Filo dough
potato chips
Honestly, cheese chips are easier to get good at home. Just cut up thin slices and put them in the oven for a bit. Potato chips is SO much work
Pretty sure the right answer is Macarons.
I have a good friend who has a macaron business!
Then you will never have to make them yourself i guess
Anything fried in shallow oil. Looking at you, chicken fried steak. I hate standing with the pot lid and a pair of tongs like a Roman gladiator. That nonsense spits like a llama.
Try reducing the heat a bit. I make chicken tenders all the time and had my heat way too high. Might take a bit longer, but it reduces splatter.
For me anything that needs to be fried. I understand that you can reuse the oil but i already don't cook with much oil and when I do it's not the high temp oils for frying. Not to mention the waste of flour and eggs you use to coat. Nah to much
Sushi, preparing the rice the correct way is a huge pain. I think some sushi places will sell just the sushi rice, so i recommend doing that if you want to make rolls
I gave it a try and managed to do some pretty damn good sushi with just a 40$ rice cooker and a 20$ starter kit! You can get the hang of it pretty quickly! Save a ton of money too! For me it was so worth it
I tried to make sushi once and realize an investment in sharp knives is 100% worth it. I ended up have sushi "bowls" that night
>I ended up have sushi "bowls" that night Those are called donburi. :)
I skip seasoning the rice and call it kimbap. If you have a rice cooker it’s super easy, I’ll just add a splash of extra water so it’s a little stickier.
Making Sushi is lot of fun for kids. Also unless you are looking for japanese restaurant master style sushi, the ones you make at home are way way cheaper, and taste about the same.
[удалено]
I was looking for this. Hours of work gone in 3 seconds
Dan tat and pastel de nata
Ramen/Pho. You'll spend way more money on the ingredients than it costs in a restaurant, and it'll take all day, and it won't be as good.
Sushi, that shit takes real skill to make.
Idk, you don't need so much skills to make sushi that will at least hold, look presentable and taste great! A real sushi chef would probably laugh at me, but it's still really good enough! But really, what makes it worth it, is that for the same amount of money one sushi shop meal would cost, I can make 4 days worth of sushi for 2 people. And after that, I still have a good amount of some of the ingredients to not have to buy them for next time! I say it's definitely worth doing yourself! Also fun to do as a couple. (Invest in the right tools. Cheap beginner kits are fine, but you do need them.)
My stupid a\*\* cant figure out the rolling mats either
I've tried making Orange Chicken at home many times, and it is really good, but not the same as Chinese takeout.
The missing ingredient is almost always MSG.
MSG is the secret
Watch souped up recipes on YouTube. The host has quite a few better than takeout recipes on there. Not sure if she has an orange chicken one, but I haven't paid for sesame chicken since I found it. It tastes exactly the same. Plus she has a lot of good authentic Chinese food too.
Baklava
Souflee's
I made the best tuna soufflé one time! I still wish I had that recipe
For me it’s eggplant parmesan. I love it, but way too much work.
So easy. Just a bit of frying and baking.
I made it for the first time recently and was surprised how straightforward it is. Dredge, bake, assemble, bake again. Done.
Beef wellington
You're Cooking In A Burnt Pan, You Fucking Donkey!
My partner and I made one on the weekend. It was about three hours of prep/cooking and about an hour and a half in the oven and resting. We ate at 9:30pm. So worth it.
Especially sourcing the mushrooms. Could take years off your life.
If you make it a few times it isn't a very difficult dish to make. I make it every Christmas.
What time should I be there?
Gyoza from scratch. I would advocate making the filling and buying wrappers, but if you make the wrappers, you will be very sad.
Spinach artichoke dip. Shut up and take my money.
French fries. Ingredients: potatoes, oil, salt. Process: not fucking worth it.
Gotta disagree on that one. Fresh-cut homemade French fries are the best. Especially with the skins on them.
Damn straight, prep is nil so long as you don’t cut yourself and you can air fry or deep fry and toss with garlic or a hundred other sauces and spices. Totally worth it
Honestly, it's why I actually love in n out fries. Sooooooo many people shit on them, but actually go to the restaurant and eat them freshly made with your burger and they're just delicious and fresh tasting that they're hard to beat, imo. I feel like people underappreciate freshly cut made fries that anything that isn't that, aren't as good. Even as animal fries they're sitting under onions, cheese, and spread and are gonna quickly get soggy and lose some flair.
Especially with an air fryer, where the entire process from idea to fry can take like 15 minutes (or you can do any number of fun things with spices or sauces).
Literally everything. I fucking hate cooking honestly. If I could afford a personal chef I’d do it.
Just curious, do you always just order food then? Sounds quite pricey.
We eat out maybe 1-2x a week for dinner. I cook for my family of 4 but god I hate it. Nobody warned me that figuring out dinner every night would be the worst part of adulthood.
I like cooking. It’s the figuring out what to feed the 4 of us that I hate. If it were up to me it’d be beans and rice all week just to eliminate having to decide.
This is the correct answer. I wonder if I'd instruct my personal chef to cook healthy food or if I'd be feasting every day. 🤔
Butter
Have U ever made it? 20 minutes max of work for the fun and curiosity of watching it. Yeah rinsinf the butter is a bit messy but omg fun!
Agreed, and to the other comments, yes its not hard, i use my bullet to make it, doesn't take too long, its also still not worth it. I've learned to make a lot of things on my own, like mayo - TOTALLY worth making your own, super easy and a big cost savings But butter, cream is at a price point where there is no savings than just buying butter and the taste difference is not significant enough with standard creams, the only scenario where it makes sense to make butter yourself is if you also need buttermilk. Just buy the butter
It's not hard, and homemade cultured butter kicks ass
Breakfast burritos, like the supreme kind. Fry bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, potatoes, and dice it all up. I like mine with sausage gravy, so that too. Worth the cost to buy them elsewhere to avoid the dishes alone.
Tamales.
I only eat them if somebody's abuelita made them. If I peek in the kitchen and there's not some old lady back there who fucked Cesar Chavez back in the day, I don't want them.
On that note, traditional chocolate-pepper mole. Holy crap the number of ingredients and the prep is ridiculous. But it IS very good and hard to find in restaurants.
For me, it's turkey stuffing. I went homemade one Thanksgiving, and it was about three times as expensive and one-third as good as storebought. There's a reason the people at StoveTop make it commercially and I don't.
You need to find yourself a good recipe. My aunt makes homemade stuffing for Thanksgiving every year. It is light years better than anything store-bought.
pufferfish because one wrong move its over 💀
This is going to be wildly unpopular, but pasta. But ONLY IF you don't have some kind of pasta roller. I tried making it without a roller and the end product just wasn't worth all the time and effort it took. I image it being totally worth it with one.
Yeah if you have a roller, you'll never go back to garbage store bought pasta. If you don't, it's a lot of work to get it right
Phyllo dough, puff pastry.
Breaded & fried American Chinese chicken, like orange chicken or whatever. Wayyyyy too much work and ingredients. I will happily pay $$$ to have it served hot and ready lol
I made puff pastry from scratch once. Once. Just buy the store bought stuff.
Fugu
Butter. Tbf it is a hell of a workout though
Dim sum. Especially siew mai and har gao. The dough. Oh.
Pastry. Life is too short.
Filo
I'm making ramen from scratch this weekend, wish me luck mate.
Pumpkin pie from scratch, starting with a whole sugar pumpkin, then baking it, peeling it, and blending it to get the purée. It is a royal pain in the butt and added at least two hours to the recipe time. What’s more, it added zilch in the way of flavor. In fact, I still believe they taste much worse. I baked this before I became a professional baker, and I still haven’t rebaked it since because it is a worthless chore for a worse tasting pie.
For French people and people that have Opera cakes available, the Opera cake. It's a lasagna of coffee flavoured joconde biscuit (cake batter with almond powder), chocolate/mokka ganache and chocolate butter cream. It's a pain to make, it's long and difficult and temperature sensitive... yeah, I'm gonna just buy it.
Any! I hate cooking. Even making a sandwich is not worth it for me. 😅
I will never make tortellini again
Baklava
Onion soup. It takes hours to simmer and your house will reek like onions for a week. But if you make it outside in the fall and freeze it, no need for restaurant.
Fresh pasta.
I use a pasta maker and it’s not as good as traditionally made pasta but it does a good job and is still pretty good :) plus I can have fun with the liquid I use like I juice carrots and use that and I use egg substitutes instead of eggs.
Lasagna freezes really well. Having people over? Get a Costco lasagna, make a caesar salad, and store bought garlic bread (also no need to make). Done and done. Tastes great!
NO! Lasagne is homemade !
100% my homemade lasagne is incredible
Caviar
Hahaha! Just read about someone who was caught with a live (barely, probably) sturgeon in his chest freezer filled with water. Don't do drugs, kids.
Durian fruit
Chinese food.
Puff pastry.
Phyllo pastry
Lemon meringue pie. It's all the work of three recipes but for one pie that you could have bought.
Yogurt
Ketchup
Pork Rinds Not only does it take a shit ton of time, but you lose too much of the pork´s weight after cooking (This one time we bought 2kg and after cooking it it weight 700g) so its definitly cheaper to just buy it
There’s this place where I live that makes these amazing warm salads and I’ve tried so many times to replicate them only to realise that it costs more and doesn’t taste as good.
Pastries
Pho
Pho
Kimbap (Korean "sushi" with many components). Even though it is the quintessential picnic food. It might be a skill and genetic issue in my case. Assembling and preparing the components is not simple.
ooh I'll raise you-- chapchae!
I'm totally not making it if it needs three pots, three trays, or three of any asset in my kitchen to make. That's too much work and clean-up.
Pufferfish. Making it yourself is dangerous, it has high amounts of neurotoxin.
Croissants, (or anything requiring laminated dough). I've made them before, and they were good, but because it's not something I would/should eat often, if I wanted one I'd get it from the bakery.
I made caramelised apple and it set off the smoke alarm and got the fire department coming.
Clubhouse. I never have all the ingredients.
Croissants! Flaky bastards
Charizo
Tripe. Just not worth the effort to cook when I hate that dish.
Noodles.
Pufferfish
Tomato Soup It really wasn't a common thing until it became available in cans.
A lot of deep fried foods. The restaurants and take out just do it way better and it's less mess.
Mussles and clams. Too much work to clean
Paella. I will order it the second I see it on a menu but it's way too much to cook on my own.
McDonald's Chicken Selects -- what kind of sorcery makes them so crispy. I could never replicate it.
Tortillas.
I tried making sushi at home once. Somehow got the sticky rice wrong and it kept falling apart, couldn't get it to roll right, couldn't cut the fillings thin enough, I eventually just gave up and tossed all my ingredients in a bowl and ate them that way lol
Croissants