A lot of people proudly proclaim that they cook from scratch. It’s much healthier to cook all of your own food rather than using pre-made, packaged food. But what is cooking from scratch? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself as I have been embracing homemaking as an act of love rather than drudgery. Because I have always cooked, but I’m not sure that all of my cooking was always from scratch. Especially when I started to see what others were cooking in their kitchens.
What Cooking from Scratch Isn’t
To tackle this question, I thought about what cooking from scratch isn’t. It isn’t popping pre-made chicken fingers and French fries into the oven. It isn’t warming up frozen meals. I think we can all agree that is just preparing a meal, not cooking. But from here, it can get a little blurry if you examine it closely. Because there are a lot of things we do as cooks that look like you are cooking all of your own meals from real ingredients from start to finish, but is that always true?
For instance, if you make a stir fry and throw in a pre-made black bean sauce, is that cooking from scratch? Is making your grilled cheese with store bought bread cooking from scratch? Is tossing your salad with pre-made salad dressing cooking from scratch?
Because I used to think it was. And now, I am not so sure. If you follow homemakers on social media, you’ll see lots of people not only making their own bread, but also growing their own vegetables and canning and preserving food like people used to in by gone days. If some of the ingredients you are using to cook your from scratch meals with are not something you made yourself, does that mean you are not cooking from scratch? It’s a question that I have been pondering.
What Cooking from Scratch Looks Like
Watching these influencers on social media reminds me how my mother used to cook when I was a little girl. And she never used ingredients that came from bottles. She made her own salad dressing. She made her own tomato sauce from real tomatoes every August, and she made enough to last a year because she canned the sauce she made–it was a lot of work and the whole family pitched in to get that tomato sauce made. My mother grew her own herbs and veggies in the summer months, though of course, we had to buy veggies during the cold Canadian winter months. She even made her own pasta from scratch–though we still bought pasta at the store as well.
Comparing how I cook to how my mother cooked made me realize, I’m not exactly cooking from scratch. I am taking short cuts when I use a store bought salad dressing or spice rub. All of these little extras we buy at the grocery store to help us prepare our meals–from ketchup to salad dressing and aioli’s–these are all pre-made ingredients that can really help a meal shine that we didn’t make with our hands. So, in this case, we are mostly cooking from scratch.
And I am not knocking that at all. The reason we have pre-made sauces and such is to make our lives easier and in the modern world where most people work outside of the home, not having to make your ketchup is something I think we can all be grateful for.
But some of these little extras that we buy that used to be a help have led us down a slippery slope. It got easier and easier to buy pre-made foods instead of cooking them. From ketchup to buying a pre-cooked roasted chicken, it’s become super easy to create meals with very little effort. And while it might seem harmless to not have to cook your own meals, or use things like salad dressings, it does mean that we are often either not cooking own food or not cooking them entirely which means we do not always know what is in our food.
You know what I’m talking about. Additives. Some of which are potentially cancer causing and can potentially do other harm to your body–like affect your kidneys or even your endocrine system, which regulates hormones. Simply use an app like Yuka to scan items in your fridge and freezer and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
And I have to admit, once I started really looking into what was in some of the harmless little extras we buy to make our lives easier, I was shocked. Some of these additives are even in organic baby food. And that’s what made me realize: I’m not cooking like my mom used to–what I am doing looks like cooking from scratch, and that is potentially harmful to our health.
What Cooking from Scratch Is
I hate to have to tell you, but if you want to cook from scratch, you have to make everything yourself. Your own mayonnaise, your own salad dressings, your own bread. It’s time consuming and even unrealistic–which is why a lot of the influencers who do homemaking accounts do not work outside of the home, among other reasons.
And when I realized what cooking from scratch would mean for me as a homemaker if I really wanted to cook from scratch, I started thinking about how I could cook from scratch but still take shortcuts. Because, let’s face it. It’s the modern world. It’s not always possible for us all to return to homesteading and farm life and grow our own foods and preserve them etc etc. As much as we might want to (and not everyone does) sometimes we simply can’t. And I have a way to cook from scratch and take short cuts.
My Modern Way to Cook from Scratch
The first and best way to cook from scratch in the modern world is to make as much as you can yourself without using pre-made ingredients. This means that I make my own salad dressings using olive oil, vinegars, and wines among other ingredients like the Parmesan cheese I use in my season salad dressing. I chose olive oil every time over seed oils like grapeseed oil or canola oil because olive oil is a healthy fat. If you can make your own bread, definitely do as it’s much better for you than anything you’ll buy from a store, especially sourdough bread.
I don’t make my own bread because we are 98% a gluten free household. Instead, I buy a sourdough buckwheat bread from Little Stream Bakery and they are producing high quality, healthy bread so I don’t have to–see, this is a short cut but it doesn’t compromise my and my family’s health. Which is the second way I maintain health and wholesomeness in our meals–by taking healthy short cuts. I faithfully use apps like Yuka to check to see if a food product I am buying is made with healthy ingredients. And I always read ingredients labels and have for years. But Yuka helps me with some of those non-pronouncible ingredients, some of which are very bad for you, and others which are risk free. Of course, I try and minimize pre-made foods with additives altogether, but if I have to, I at least can choose the healthiest option.
My husband and I both cook, so one of us makes dinner every day using real foods. We use a lot of spices and herbs in our cooking to add flavour, and reduce cooking time with kitchen tools like the Instant Pot. You can read about some ways I make delicious meals in this article.
If you are wondering what I make from scratch that has been a game changer for me, here is the list of ones that are super easy to start with:
- salad dressings
- salsa
- soups
- broths
- ice cream
- spice rubs (pork, chicken, Lebanese style etc)
- dips and spreads
- baked goods
There is a ton more you can make yourself from scratch of course–mayonnaise for example, but those are ones I have found the most useful to make myself. While I can make ketchup and mayo myself, I don’t because I don’t use them often enough, and opt instead to buy a healthy bottled variety.
This is how I cook from scratch in the modern world. I try and make as much as possible from scratch myself, and those things that are not practical for me to make I either skip in my meals or I buy the healthiest pre-made I can find. I have found that this method has worked for our family and has produced us with delicious and healthy meals.
Do you have any tips for cooking from scratch in the modern world? Share in the comments!