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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 got a deep fryer that goes on the countertop and has a temperature deal. The lid fits over the basket so I don’t have to get anywhere near the oil when it’s hot. When I’m done frying, there’s a temperature-sensitive mechanism to drain the oil into a box below to store it until next time (it can be reused a few times). The part that holds the oil when frying gets wiped out and tossed in the dishwasher. The only thing I really have to deal with washing is the heating element. It turns deep frying from absolutely not worth trying to deal with the mess/temperature/hot oil/cleanup to something I’m willing to do more than once a year. Don’t let your fry dreams be dreams!
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
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.
yeah it is annoying when using a small pan/stove as opposed to a giant griddle where one crepe is actually a lot
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
Included in “make the batter” but yep, important step not to be forgotten 👌
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gyoza/potstickers/dumplings
I will inhale plates of em and the time it takes to wrap em made me both appreciate the food more and appreciate the premade ones so much more
In the same line, gnocchi.
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.
When I get a million dollars, that’d be me.
You might be sliiiightly overestimating the cost of a stove and pans.
How else are you gonna get two pans at the same time? I figure with that kind of money, I’d find a way.
Or a griddle, same idea. Get more surface area.
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.
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
i have depression and adhd so it varies between every food and no food based on the rng going on in the ol’ endocrine
Sometimes brain say making gnocchi is no big deal.
Other times, grill cheese too much.
I just remind myself that I once thought it was a good idea to make an entire thanksgiving dinner for 3 people using a college dorm kitchen, and then the idea of frying a cheese sandwich doesn’t seem that daunting.
Tip though for grilled cheese is butter the pan not the bread.
Interesting tip…I’ve never thought of doing it that way but it would eliminate my prime annoyance with the process (cold butter tearing the bread).
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.
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.
Ravioli, pierogies, wontons. Basically anything small that’s wrapped up like that. Huge PITA and the quality improvement usually isn’t worth it.
Maybe something worth doing in a social setting with a group though. Have some beers and BS while assembling everything.
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.
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.
Tortellini look extra annoying. I always thought they were done with a machine.
Once you get the technique down, they’re just ravioli with a little twist at the end. Just less forgiving.
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.
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.
IMO homemade ice cream is primarily for making flavors you can’t get otherwise.
I am a vanilla ice cream being. Or banana which is more difficult, but ultimately findable!
I like occasionally making some really weird stuff, tends to be very hit or miss. Totally wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have an ice cream machine though. I’ve done it fully by hand before. Never again.
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Ice cream snob here, I can make better stuff at home than at any grocery store, but I can’t top a good gelateria if you’re lucky enough to have one nearby. If I didn’t have access to a good local spot I’d still make it.
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.
Agreed. I’ll gladly spend the extra buck for kerrygold. Not quite as good as homemade with high quality cream, but more than close enough (and cheaper depending on just how high quality were talking with the cream).
You can use a stand mixer, btw. Only really worth it for compound butter though, IMO.
I’d still rather just buy some nice butter! Compound, maybe in the future.
Stand mixer, hand mixer, food processor , magic bullet. All fast and easy
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.
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.
