We have all heard of cooking from scratch. Maybe your grandmother was known for those biscuits she made from scratch or for her homemade pie crust. Unfortunately, many of us grew up in families where the convenience of processed foods and lack of understanding of what was really in them, led to most of our dinners being comprised of box mac-n-cheese, biscuits from a can, and dishes where the majority of the ingredients were processed foods mixed together.
There is an art to cooking from scratch and it isn’t a skill you learn overnight. I have been cooking certain things from scratch all my life, but I am still learning new skills, increasing what I cook from scratch and buying less food that is processed. It is well worth the time and effort to learn.
Of course, you won’t be able to make everything from scratch. I made a cheese cake recently and, no, I did not make the graham crackers I used for the crust. You have had to find a balance. I make from scratch what I feel we eat the most of, what I cannot find clean alternatives for, and what just makes sense for my family.
So let’s discuss all the reasons that you should start cooking from scratch, too.
1. When You Cook From Scratch, You Know What Your Family Is Eating
How many times have you picked up a box of something you have used for years and randomly read the ingredients, only to find that it is full of things you had no idea were in it?
My wake-up call was cake mix. I had found out that one of my kids was having bad reactions to food dye. I threw out candy, checked labels of anything that looked artificially colored, I thought I had found it all! One day I was in my pantry getting a box of yellow cake mix out to make something. I used to use yellow cake mix a lot as an ingredient in other desserts. Out of what had now become habit, I read the label. My heart sank. It had yellow dye on the ingredients list.
All the things I had gotten rid of before, I could do without. But not cake mix. How was I going to make cakes for my kids’ birthdays, since I had never made a cake from scratch before. I searched every box of yellow cake mix that my grocery store carried, but they were all the same. My solution was to resort to white cake mix for birthdays and stop making all my recipes that included yellow cake mix as an ingredient.
I thought making a cake from scratch was hard. That is what I had heard. Everyone said boxed was just as good and easier. Well I am here to tell you, I found out a few years later that it isn’t that hard and it is so much better.
You know what is the best part though? My made from scratch cakes don’t have all those ingredients, that I have no idea what they are, in them. Just simple ingredients that I keep in my pantry.
2. Cooking From Scratch Lets You Control The Ingredients In Your Food
When you cook from scratch you get to control the ingredients. You know where they came from and if they are really what you think they are.
It seems like every time I turn around I see another story about what is hidden in a common processed food. We have the right to know what we are consuming, but, unfortunately, many companies don’t think we do and use deceptive tactics to hide what is really in their products.
The more you cook from scratch, though, the more you are cutting out ingredients you are unaware of in your food.
It also makes it easier when you are trying to cut out a particular food or ingredient from yours’ or your families’ diet. When you cook from scratch you can learn how to make substitutes that would have been impossible to find in that food processed or would not have been in your budget on a regular bases.
3. Homemade Food Is Healthier For You
One of my biggest disgusts at processed food is the use of high fructose corn syrup. I cannot tell you how many foods I have stopped buying because of this one ingredient. High fructose corn syrup is very detrimental to our health and is a completely unnecessary ingredient.
However it isn’t the only thing we avoid when we cook from scratch. We cut out all of the preservatives, chemical emulsifiers, artificial and “natural” (which doesn’t always mean what we think it means) flavoring, food dye, seed oils, and other nonsense ingredients.
When we cook from scratch we can use quality ingredients and cut out the junk. Tallow, lard, grassfed butter, avocado oil, olive oil, and coconut oil are all rarely found on the ingredients list of processed food; and if they are, they are usually still in addition to a seed oil. This was not the case years ago, but as companies found they could increase their profits by swapping out quality ingredients for cheaper, less healthy options, most companies chose greed over the health of the consumer.
Have you ever noticed how long it can take a loaf of bread from the store to mold? I have personally found a partial loaf that got hidden behind something in my pantry and I know it was at least a month old, but there was no mold on it at all. My homemade bread will mold in four days, maybe six if I am very careful about my storage method. Bread should not be able to sit for a month without molding. No wonder our bodies struggle to digest processed food properly.
Processed food is also less filling than homemade food. Companies do this intentionally. The more you eat the more they sell. You may even find that your homemade food stretches a bit further than what you were buying from the store and your family needs to eat less to be full.
4. Your Meals Will Taste Better From Scratch
Maybe this should go without saying, but homemade tastes better. After so many years of cooking from scratch I now find the texture of store bought bread disgusting. I can taste the chemicals in donuts from the bakery. Oh, and you know what else, I no longer really care about going out to eat because I rarely find a restaurant who makes better food than I can make at home.
There just isn’t a substitute for food made with real ingredients.
Even fresh vegetables can be “processed”. For years I was buying baby carrots for convenience. I would boil them, use them in stews, and eat them raw. I always wondered why there was a weird taste to them. Honestly they tasted a bit like bleach, but I had used them so long I just ignored it. After all I was buying them organic, so they had to be healthy, right?
Unfortunately they are not healthy. Baby carrots are rinsed in a chlorine solution to sanitize them. They say it is similar to what is in tap water. Well, I don’t drink city tap water, and one of the reasons is the chlorine in it. So, I wasn’t crazy, I was tasting bleach!
What I found, though, as I switched to buying whole carrots and taking the time to peal and chop them myself, was that they actually cooked quicker. Baby carrots would take forever to get soft and sometimes some of the carrots just never did. By taking the time to clean and chop the carrots myself I was saving time in the cooking process and my food tasted way better and was healthier.
5. Cooking From Scratch Saves Money
Now I am not going to tell you that you can make every product in the grocery store cheaper than you can buy it, but I am pretty convinced you can make a cleaner version of that product cheaper than you could buy the cleaner version of it already made.
Convenience foods are often made with cheap ingredients. Once I realized this, I started looking for healthier alternatives. The problem was, I had a big family to feed and I couldn’t afford to triple the cost of my meal to buy the clean, organic version of that one ingredient. Now it wasn’t always that much more than the cheap version, but where it was I decided that was a good product to start learning to make from scratch.
I also live in a small town with limited grocery options and often clean and organic versions of products are just not available here. So if I didn’t want to drive an hour, wasting gas and time, to get that ingredient I had to learn to make it.
I can make a loaf of bread with organic flour for less than $2. That is $2 less than the bread I used to buy and $4.50 less than the organic bread at the store that my kids wouldn’t eat. So I spend half of the amount I was spending and I have organic bread my kids will actually eat. We eat a lot of bread, so I save around $50 or more a month on just bread.
Not everything I make from saves me that much, but most of it saves me something and it is better quality than I could afford to buy already made.
6. Making Food From Scratch Is More Rewarding
When you take the time to make a homecooked meal from scratch it is the best feeling of satisfaction.
First of all, you learned a skill that you can now carry with you through the rest of your life. You don’t have to learn everything at one time, but once you learn how to make a dish or an ingredient you will always be able to do that.
Second, you can feel better knowing you have provided a healthy meal for your family. Your hands prepared that meal and it is so much more rewarding to watch them scarf down something that you took the time to make from scratch rather than a dinner you bought frozen and threw in the oven for an hour.
Lastly, you have something you can now pass down to your children and grandchildren – the ability to feed your family with wholesome, nourishing food. You can also teach your family to have appreciation for the art of cooking and for the blessing of having homecooked meals to eat.
7. Cooking From Scratch Makes You A Better Cook
Learning how to make one thing tends to build a skill that makes it easier to make something else. Once you learn how to make biscuits from scratch, you can then learn how to make pie crust. They both require the technique of cutting butter into flour, but dealing with biscuit dough is a bit easier than pie crust dough. So learn one thing at a time, and once you feel confident in that, try something else that uses a similar skill set.
Once I learned how to make a rue it was easy to throw together a sauce for anything I wanted to make. If you have never made any sauce from scratch, though, you would not know how to go about thickening it or how to make the base of a sauce. Trying new recipes can teach you new techniques you can use in your day to day cooking to make other things.
Another way it can help you cook better is to make you familiar with how much of an ingredient to use. I make so much bread that it is easy for me to alter the recipe or create my own and know how much of each ingredient I should use for it to turn out right. When I make up a recipe with beans I know how much salt to use per a pound of beans because I have another bean recipe I make all the time that uses a certain amount of salt per a pound of beans. Since it is enough salt for that recipe, then I can figure out how much I need when I am throwing together my own recipe with beans.
Cooking from scratch also teaches you what ingredients go well together. You may have never known that a certain dish got it’s flavor from celery seed until you made it from scratch. But now that you know that, if you want to recreate that flavor in another dish you know you will need to add celery seed.
Cooking from scratch is like any other skill. It takes practice. But it is well worth the challenge to learn. I know your family will thank you and you will be blessed knowing that you put in the effort to provide such healthy, delicious food for your family.
