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.
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
Included in “make the batter” but yep, important step not to be forgotten 👌
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
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?
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 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!
I don’t remember the oil being much of a hassle tbh
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.
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.
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).
Seriously it’s the perfect way to do it. You know your pan is hot enough. The butter is nicely browned. I do find a small pan is the right way to keep a good layer but if you have a slightly larger pan using a spatula to keep the butter contained to one space and then put in the grilled cheese while the butter’s still a little solid works too. It’s probably been more than a decade since I last buttered the bread not the pan and I’m not even 30 it’s just the best way.
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
How simpler could something be
I do wonder this a lot on Lemmy
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 :)
The store bought pie dough isn’t vegetarian because it’s made with lard. I learned that when I served a pie to some vegetarian friends.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
If you’ve got a pressure cooker you can make pho ga (chicken pho) in under 30 minutes and it’s almost as good as beef in my opinion. Also way cheaper to make than beef pho.
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.
Corn tortillas. It’s a lot easier to just buy some.
I disagree on this one, corn tortillas are really simple if you have a press. The dough is literally just mix masa and water. And to cook them, you just put it on a hot surface for 30 seconds. Meanwhile corn tortillas from the store are always so dry and tasteless, they’re rarely worth buying
I agree a lot of commercial corn tortillas are not good. I particularly don’t like the fake-soft ones that have dough conditioners and preservatives for no reason. But with as much cooking as I do, I can’t bring myself to make tortillas when I make masa - I always end up doing pupusas, arepas or tamales. My main use of corn tortillas is enchiladas casserole style so homemade ones are kind of pointless since they 75% disintegrate.
My kids won’t even eat store bought tortillas.
Yup I can’t find anything in the stores that compares and I don’t mind making them. Really only do this in the summer when there’s some garden ingredients though, with a ground meat or bean sauce for protein.
Part corn part wheat is the best tortilla, but I can’t buy them near me so i make them sometimes.
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 :)
