You Don’t Have to Make Everything From Scratch to Eat Real Food
Updated: Sep 25
There’s a particular kind of cooking advice that sounds wonderful until Tuesday afternoon rolls around.
Make your own bread. Cook beans from dried. Simmer your own stock. Make the salad dressing. Ferment the vegetables. Roll the tortillas. Roast a chicken instead of buying one from the store.
And while you’re at it, apparently you should churn the butter and start thinking seriously about acquiring a dairy cow.
I love cooking from scratch. I’m a chef. There are plenty of things I make myself because they taste better, cost less, have better ingredients—or because I simply enjoy making them.
But I also have a family, a job, a business and a finite number of hours in the day.
Eating real food does not require making everything from scratch.
In fact, I think insisting that it does can make eating well harder for families, not easier.
The goal shouldn’t be culinary purity.
The goal should be getting good food on the table consistently.
Cooking From Scratch Isn’t a Moral Achievement
Somewhere along the way, “homemade” became synonymous with “healthy,” while anything that came in a package became suspect.
But packaging isn't particularly useful for determining whether a food belongs in your kitchen.
A can of tomatoes is processed.
Frozen broccoli is processed.
Plain Greek yogurt is processed.
Cheese is processed.
A jar of olives is processed.
Canned beans are processed.
None of that makes them inherently poor choices.
As I discussed in Is Ultra-Processed Food Really the Problem?, there’s an important difference between food being processed and a diet being dominated by highly formulated ultra-processed foods.
That distinction matters because otherwise we end up putting a bag of frozen peas and a packaged snack cake into the same mental category simply because neither came directly out of the ground and onto our plate.
That doesn't make much sense to me.
I Use Shortcuts. Lots of Them.
If you've cooked many of my recipes, you'll probably notice something.
I'm perfectly willing to cheat.
Not bad cheating. Useful cheating.
I regularly use things like canned tomatoes, canned beans, frozen vegetables, tomato paste, jarred roasted peppers, quality pasta sauce and other ingredients somebody else has already done some work on.
One of my favorite examples is broth.
Could I save chicken bones and vegetable scraps, simmer them for hours, strain everything and portion homemade stock into containers for the freezer?
Absolutely.
Sometimes I do.
But on an ordinary weeknight, I'm perfectly happy putting a good bouillon paste into water and getting on with dinner.
That one shortcut eliminates cartons of half-used broth cluttering the refrigerator, lets me make exactly as much as I need and means I can always have the makings of soup in the pantry.
That's not abandoning real-food cooking.
That's making real-food cooking easier to actually do.
The Question I Ask About Convenience Food
Rather than asking:
“Did I make this from scratch?”
I think a more useful question is:
“What job is this food doing for me?”
If a convenience ingredient saves twenty minutes and helps turn a handful of ingredients into dinner, that's valuable.
A rotisserie chicken can become chicken soup, tacos, salad or fried rice.
A can of beans can become soup, chili, hummus or part of a grain bowl.
Frozen vegetables can turn eggs into a frittata or leftover rice into dinner.
A jar of marinara can save you from ordering pizza on a night when nobody has the energy to cook.
Those foods aren't replacing cooking.
They're helping you cook.
That's an important distinction.
Some Things Are Worth Making Yourself
This doesn't mean I think everything should come out of a package, either.
There are plenty of foods where making them yourself takes surprisingly little effort and gives you considerably more control over what you're eating.
Salad dressing is a great example.
Oil, vinegar or citrus, mustard, salt and a few seasonings can become a vinaigrette in about two minutes.
Mayonnaise is another. If you have an immersion blender, homemade mayo takes roughly as long as finding the jar in the refrigerator.
Simple sauces, marinades and spice blends are often the same way.
And when I have the time, I love long cooking projects. Homemade bread is fantastic. So is stock that's been simmering all afternoon.
But there's a difference between saying:
“This is worth making when I can.”
and:
“If I don't make this myself, I'm doing something wrong.”
I don't believe the second one is particularly helpful.
Spend Your Time Where It Matters
This is probably the biggest lesson I've learned from cooking professionally.
Not every component of a meal deserves the same amount of your time.
If I'm making tacos on a Wednesday night, maybe I'm going to spend my effort on properly seasoning and cooking the meat.
The tortillas can come from somebody else.
If I'm making soup, maybe I'll spend twenty minutes sautéing the vegetables and developing flavor before adding the liquid.
The broth can start with bouillon.
If I'm making pasta, perhaps I'll cook vegetables and protein from scratch but open a jar of marinara.
Good cooking is often about deciding where your effort will make the biggest difference.
That's also how restaurant kitchens work.
Professional cooks aren't standing around congratulating themselves for making every ingredient from its most primitive possible form. They decide what deserves labor, what can be prepared ahead and where a good-quality prepared ingredient makes sense.
Home cooks should be allowed the same freedom.
Convenience Foods I’m Happy to Keep Around
My kitchen will never be free of packaged food, and I don't want it to be.
There are certain ingredients that make it dramatically easier to turn what's already in the refrigerator into dinner.
Things like:
Canned beans
Canned tomatoes and tomato paste
Frozen vegetables
Frozen fruit
Bouillon paste
Jarred marinara
Olives and pickled vegetables
Sauerkraut and kimchi
Canned tuna and sardines
Plain yogurt and kefir
Cheese
Good-quality tortillas
Rice, pasta and other grains
Rotisserie chicken when life calls for it
The exact list in your kitchen will look different from mine.
That's fine.
The point isn't to create another approved-food list.
The point is to build a kitchen where a reasonably good dinner is easier than giving up on dinner altogether.
“From Scratch” Can Become Its Own Kind of Food Rule
This is where I think conversations about healthy eating sometimes go sideways.
We start with a reasonable goal:
Eat more real food.
Then we gradually pile rules onto it.
Everything should be organic.
Everything should be homemade.
Nothing should come from a package.
You should bake your own bread.
You should soak your own beans.
You should make bone broth every Sunday.
Before long, feeding your family has become a second full-time job.
And when the standard becomes impossible to maintain, people understandably abandon the whole thing.
I'd rather see a family cook four nights a week using some smart shortcuts than cook everything completely from scratch for six days and decide they're never doing it again.
Sustainable beats perfect.
Every time.
The Best Convenience Food Is the One You Make for Yourself
There's another kind of convenience food that I think gets overlooked:
leftovers.
When I make dinner, I rarely think only about tonight.
A little extra roasted chicken can become tomorrow's lunch.
Extra rice can become fried rice.
Roasted vegetables can go into eggs.
A pot of soup can cover lunch for several days.
A larger batch of meat sauce can become an entirely different dinner later in the week.
That's one of the ideas behind the meal plans I'm building for Dad Man Can Cook.
Instead of asking families to cook an entirely new dinner every single night, I want to help you cook strategically—make enough food when you're already cooking, then use that work again.
That's convenience food too.
You just made it yourself.
Real Food Has to Work in Real Life
I want people to cook more.
I want families eating together when they can.
I want kids growing up around vegetables, soups, roasted meats, beans, grains, herbs, sauces and all the incredible flavors that exist outside the center aisles of the grocery store.
But none of that happens if our definition of “real food” requires people to reorganize their entire lives around the kitchen.
Sometimes dinner starts with onions, carrots and celery hitting a hot pan.
Sometimes it starts with a rotisserie chicken.
Sometimes you simmer stock for six hours.
Sometimes you reach for the bouillon.
Sometimes you make the sauce.
Sometimes you open the jar.
The goal isn't to prove that you can make everything from scratch.
The goal is to build a way of cooking that works well enough—and tastes good enough—that you actually want to keep doing it.
Because dinner comes around again tomorrow.
And I'd rather help make that dinner easier.
— Chef Evan
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