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The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively. True! ...convinced into believing that everything needs to be cooked from scratch and th

The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively. True! ...convinced into believing that everything needs to be cooked from scratch and that any meal that involves a kit or a flavor packet is inferior. These kits and flavor packets also come from the store, and also contain unnecessary ingredients. Family members from other generations insist on using envelopes of powder for everything, and they eat more poorly as a result. They need the powder to make gravy, while we gen-Xers whip that up from fat, flour, and any flavorful liquid. Watch Alton Brown for ten minutes, and eat better for the rest of your life.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I know perfectly well how to make a gravy from scratch. It's not hard, anyone can do it. Gravy is just flour, fat, stock, and seasoning. Cook it long enough without seasoning and you have a roux. Cook for a few minutes and add milk and you've got a white gravy. But for a brown gravy to be served with dinner, most people own one fridge/freezer. They aren't going to sit there and reduce chicken or beef broth to make stock, doing the little ice-cube-in-a-ziplock trick, and virtually all store-bought shelf-stable stocks are horrible and virtually indistinguishable from broths. Most don't have the room and don't want to spend the time. It is vastly easier and more time efficient when getting home from work with mouths to feed to use an off-the-shelf product and doctor it up than it is to go through all the steps needed to produce a similar quality gravy, and there's virtually no nutritional difference between one and the other despite the snobbish protestations of people like Alton Brown, who has never been involved at any level of professional food preparation. He's a drama nerd who found a niche, not a chef. Go look at a restaurant supply store website. Marvel at all the fun powders and bouillon and other flavor enhancers they have. If Michelin star restaurants can use them, so can you. Anyway, say you want to make fried chicken. You know that buttermilk is a great marinade. How many different things can you use to achieve a similar result? You can: 1. Just use buttermilk 2. Rehydrate buttermilk powder and use that 3. Use ranch dressing 4. Use a ranch dressing packet 5. Thin out yogurt and use that 6. Use kefir 7. Literally use any other slightly acidic dressing The important thing is NOT the buttermilk. It's the acid in the buttermilk that helps keep the meat tender, and the viscosity that keeps it stuck to the meat. I rarely use it, because I don't keep buttermilk around. I usually use either ranch or off-the-shelf Italian dressing.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  By all means, eat what you want to eat. No judgment. I was just trying to understand the difference between "dessert topping tomato sauce" snobbery and "gravy from a mysterious powder that is secretly mostly corn starch" hypothetical practicality. There seems to be a contradiction? Scratch gravy takes like 20% longer than envelope-of-mysterious-powder gravy, while good tomato sauce takes hours. Of course, you can make it on the weekend and throw it in the freezer, but the same is true of homemade stock and basically every other prepared ingredient. (including gravy!) I literally do have multiple boomer-generation family members who cannot make a gravy from scratch. The "greatest" generation folks in my family, while we still had them around, were also not outstanding cooks. They had an excuse, because they grew up in shotgun cabins eating government commodities. I'm not so sure about the boomers...
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    It was specifically about the sugar content and how American tastes have morphed to expect those things. Good tomato sauce does not take hours unless you're trying to cook it in a skillet on a sidewalk in Arizona. Sunday sauce is a bit different, but that's because you're simmering meat in it. Gravy is an entirely different animal. Yes, it's mostly flour and corn starch, but it's also not the star of the dish the way that tomato sauce is. I don't know anybody in my family aside from my Gen X sister and millennial cousins who can't make gravy from scratch. My "Greatest Generation" grandmother in particular only cooked about 30-40 dishes, but she cooked them so regularly that she didn't need a cookbook, and they were never anything but great (except when she tried to feed me frozen pizza when I would stay over for the week. She'd throw American cheese and ham on top because she didn't believe it would be filling enough).
    - klodolph 4y ago
      I think there was a bit of a backlash against sauces from the gen-x and millennial crowd, and that may explain why they can’t make gravy. Popularity and fashion explains a lot, and gravy was NOT popular during the gen-x and millennial eras. I think this is just because we got bad TV dinners drowning in sauce, nothing more or less than that. The baby boomers I know had a similar backlash against canned goods—boomers had plenty of awful canned Lima beans made into casseroles growing up, and it put many of them off canned goods in general, for better or worse. Just another example of fashion in food—lard is coming back in fashion as an ingredient in home cooking, and in the UK, brown sauce is going out of fashion.
bobthepanda 4y ago
I think something that would be more useful, would be to make your own seasoning mixes at home. Since most of the time none of the ingredients of, say, taco seasoning are particularly challenging.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I know perfectly well how to make a gravy from scratch. It's not hard, anyone can do it. Gravy is just flour, fat, stock, and seasoning. Cook it long enough without seasoning and you have a roux. Cook for a few minutes and add milk and you've got a white gravy. But for a brown gravy to be served with dinner, most people own one fridge/freezer. They aren't going to sit there and reduce chicken or beef broth to make stock, doing the little ice-cube-in-a-ziplock trick, and virtually all store-bought shelf-stable stocks are horrible and virtually indistinguishable from broths. Most don't have the room and don't want to spend the time. It is vastly easier and more time efficient when getting home from work with mouths to feed to use an off-the-shelf product and doctor it up than it is to go through all the steps needed to produce a similar quality gravy, and there's virtually no nutritional difference between one and the other despite the snobbish protestations of people like Alton Brown, who has never been involved at any level of professional food preparation. He's a drama nerd who found a niche, not a chef. Go look at a restaurant supply store website. Marvel at all the fun powders and bouillon and other flavor enhancers they have. If Michelin star restaurants can use them, so can you. Anyway, say you want to make fried chicken. You know that buttermilk is a great marinade. How many different things can you use to achieve a similar result? You can: 1. Just use buttermilk 2. Rehydrate buttermilk powder and use that 3. Use ranch dressing 4. Use a ranch dressing packet 5. Thin out yogurt and use that 6. Use kefir 7. Literally use any other slightly acidic dressing The important thing is NOT the buttermilk. It's the acid in the buttermilk that helps keep the meat tender, and the viscosity that keeps it stuck to the meat. I rarely use it, because I don't keep buttermilk around. I usually use either ranch or off-the-shelf Italian dressing.

jessaustin 4y ago
By all means, eat what you want to eat. No judgment. I was just trying to understand the difference between "dessert topping tomato sauce" snobbery and "gravy from a mysterious powder that is secretly mostly corn starch" hypothetical practicality. There seems to be a contradiction? Scratch gravy takes like 20% longer than envelope-of-mysterious-powder gravy, while good tomato sauce takes hours. Of course, you can make it on the weekend and throw it in the freezer, but the same is true of homemade stock and basically every other prepared ingredient. (including gravy!) I literally do have multiple boomer-generation family members who cannot make a gravy from scratch. The "greatest" generation folks in my family, while we still had them around, were also not outstanding cooks. They had an excuse, because they grew up in shotgun cabins eating government commodities. I'm not so sure about the boomers...
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  It was specifically about the sugar content and how American tastes have morphed to expect those things. Good tomato sauce does not take hours unless you're trying to cook it in a skillet on a sidewalk in Arizona. Sunday sauce is a bit different, but that's because you're simmering meat in it. Gravy is an entirely different animal. Yes, it's mostly flour and corn starch, but it's also not the star of the dish the way that tomato sauce is. I don't know anybody in my family aside from my Gen X sister and millennial cousins who can't make gravy from scratch. My "Greatest Generation" grandmother in particular only cooked about 30-40 dishes, but she cooked them so regularly that she didn't need a cookbook, and they were never anything but great (except when she tried to feed me frozen pizza when I would stay over for the week. She'd throw American cheese and ham on top because she didn't believe it would be filling enough).
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I think there was a bit of a backlash against sauces from the gen-x and millennial crowd, and that may explain why they can’t make gravy. Popularity and fashion explains a lot, and gravy was NOT popular during the gen-x and millennial eras. I think this is just because we got bad TV dinners drowning in sauce, nothing more or less than that. The baby boomers I know had a similar backlash against canned goods—boomers had plenty of awful canned Lima beans made into casseroles growing up, and it put many of them off canned goods in general, for better or worse. Just another example of fashion in food—lard is coming back in fashion as an ingredient in home cooking, and in the UK, brown sauce is going out of fashion.

bobthepanda 4y ago

I think something that would be more useful, would be to make your own seasoning mixes at home. Since most of the time none of the ingredients of, say, taco seasoning are particularly challenging.