Food items you should always make, not buy

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Curry powder. Roasting and grinding whole spices tastes so much better.

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It really makes a world of difference, I never really believed it until I started cooking Indian food using a 'high end' cookbook
 
Pancetta. Salt pork. Cheaper and tastes better than anything you'll buy.
 
Pickles (and pickled onions) - I always have jars of both on deck
Stocks (definitely agree, store bought sucks)
Salsa (super easy to make, and is amazing)
Any seasonings - I never have pre-mixed seasonings, and you can figure out what you like and remake it all the time, and it lasts forever.
Ground beef (I mix usually do a mix of chuck/brisket/sirloin or ribeye)
Any tomato based sauce, I can ~100 lbs of tomatoes every year though, so I always have fresh tomato flavor all year
 
I found a way how to make easy thing to add in food, which you can keep for 1-2 months and make yourself. You just need some butter and your favorite herbs - I put parsley, dill, basil and selery (sometimes). Butter should be soft. Just mix it with the herbs, roll in the food foil and freeze. Every time you cook a new dish, take your butter roll, cut some and put in your hot food. The taste is really nice!
You need to do it just one time and use for a month or two. Enjoy ;)
 
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Garam Masala. You can't f it up unless you use more than a couple of cloves.
 
spaceconvoy said:
As an Italian American I wholeheartedly disagree. Not worth the effort at all, except for certain dishes where you need a softer texture, like ravioli or lasagna. For a regular pasta dish with sauce, homemade pasta is worse. It'll never get as perfectly al dente as boxed pasta. Even if you're a total psycho and make it weeks in advance, it's still not dense enough. And you're telling me you can really notice that homemade fresh flour taste? F outta here
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Not Italian , but I totally agree. Quality dried pasta is wonderful , fast and easy. Fresh pasta is literally not worth the effort..... Unless I am making ravioli / tortellini , etc. if it's a stuffed pasta , then I am making it, because frozen ravioli is awful. Costco sells a premade ravioli that is not frozen that is pretty damn good , btw. Stuffed shells are not included because I don't have to fold the dough on itself.
 
I see pre-made roux in a jar at the grocery store and it makes me big sad.

Stock is #1 for me. I just keep a 2 gal bag in the freezer with all my veggie trimmings and random animal bones from every chicken/pork shoulder/beef bone marrow canoe that I smoke. Every batch turns out different and it's always way more rich and flavorful than the store bought stuff.

Tallow is another. I have a constant jar of beef, pork, and occasionally duck renderings in the fridge (separate jars). A picanha is like $28 and the trimmings from that and a brisket will give you enough tallow to last 2 months. No sense buying the overpriced goo at the store
 
Stock is tricky; yes, 'proper stock is better', but it's not like I have enough stock to go boil my pasta in it or waste it willy nilly. My reality is that I simply consume more stock than I could even hope to produce.
Tallow isn't even sold in the stores here... heck you can't even find lard in the Netherlands.
 
Jovidah said:
Stock is tricky; yes, 'proper stock is better', but it's not like I have enough stock to go boil my pasta in it or waste it willy nilly. My reality is that I simply consume more stock than I could even hope to produce.
Tallow isn't even sold in the stores here... heck you can't even find lard in the Netherlands.
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Easily fixed. Just save pork trimmings in the freezer for a while. Cut into small cubes and render the fat in a cast iron pan. Sticking it into the oven works really well. The left-behind crispy bits of tissue are delicious, too.

In Bavaria, a local specialty is "Griebenschmalz" (crackling lard), which is rendered lard with the crispy bits left in, plus a bit of salt. Put that on some rye bread, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and chopped chives, and you have a very delicious (if unhealthy) meal.
 
I actually already re-use a lot of my meat trimmings. Usually whatever I have gets browned in the oven, the fat gets seperated to be reused and the rest gets turned into stock. But I honestly just don't have all that much of it. Or if it's for example chicken thighs with the fat on I'll start the dish with rendering that out at the start and doing the rest of the dish from there.

To be honest I've tried supermarket lard and taste wise it never impressed me that much, it was always super bland. But I guess you mostly use it for the better texture. But flavor wise I think the bird fats are way better, and not all that much more expensive.
It is however interesting how here in the Netherlands tallow and lard are something I haven't seen...ever....whereas 5 km across the border I can actually find both in a simple supermarket. Weird how different the eating culture can be at such a short distance.
 
Jovidah said:
To be honest I've tried supermarket lard and taste wise it never impressed me that much, it was always super bland. But I guess you mostly use it for the better texture.
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Lard isn't about flavor for me; the flavor is mild and very subtle. It's about the crispness it imparts when frying in it, and a moreishness it adds to dishes that I don't know how to describe. Like umami? Mouth-filling? Savory? I'm not sure what words to use, but I'm a big fan. Tallow has a similar quality, but not as strongly, and there is more overt flavor there, which limits the applications for which it fits well. Chicken fat has it least of all, and is dominated by its flavor and a certain stickiness of texture. Not much a of a fan of chicken fat, once it is removed from the chicken.
 
Mayo has become a must-make for me. After I started making my own, I could only taste the chemicals in the store-bought stuff.

Tomato sauce and chili oil are two that I try to always make now because of how expensive they’ve become to buy jarred. Both scale up easily too. Yogurt is another in that category recently.
 
Tonkatsu sauce. Bulldog and other store bought sauces are crap. The first three ingredients in Bulldog are water, high fructose corn syrup and sugar.

You can make a tastier version by combining ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and oyster sauce. Some add sugar, but it’s really not necessary.

Perfect for tonkatsu, okonomiyaki, menchi katsu and croquettes…
 
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