I don't think that most folks can make their own bread simply because of time constraints. And honestly, we have a long history of folks not making their own bread.
See, I do make bread. Daily. But I also don't have a job. It takes a few hours a day, but that's OK for me. At some times, when I've been poor, I've made bread on weekends, but freezing that bread to eat later isn't quite as lovely. But again, it takes hours and requires a working oven too (I had a toaster oven when I couldn't afford natural gas.
And really, that last bit gives us a view into the past: Kitchens used to be dangerous and a lot of folks didn't have proper ovens if they lived in cities. Folks have been buying bread from the baker for... um... centuries. And it was better for everyone because it kept some of the fire risk contained. Plus the bakers could make lots with less fuel than individual folks could do, which is honestly even a bonus now.
I'm not sure we are really losing stuff by not making bread - even if I make it and enjoy the fresh bread. Anyone can look it up online if they really want to.
In most of Europe, high-quality bread is cheap and available everywhere. In the US, high-quality bread is extremely expensive and only available in specialty bakeries. People who are really into bread in the US often make their own. In Europe, where you can buy fresh bread on every street corner, why bother making it yourself?
I don't mind cooking from scratch. I find it rather fun and relaxing. Fresh ingredients are problematic, though. I can store a ton of frozen/canned food that's good for a long time and eat what I want, or I can buy fresh ingredients and then I'm pretty much locked into those choices whether I want it or have time to cook or not.
Places like TGI Fridays, Chilis and services like Doordash give people a huge range of options that you just can't replicate without frozen/canned foods. If I tried to buy ingredients to make anything a Chilis can, the vast majority would spoil before I could cook them. The food would probably be better than Chilis while it was around, though.
We got used to getting what we wanted, instead of what we had. The only way to replicate that is long-lasting food.
Five years ago I made the decision to eat lower carb, I didn’t want to give up tomato sauce dishes entirely and found most of the canned tomato products still too high in sugar. Moved to just buying decent ripe Roma/plum tomatoes (they tend to be the lowest in natural sugar content), slice them in half and roast them with a head of garlic, stick blend them and simmer with a little chicken broth and white wine, fresh garlic, basil, bay leaf…and you have a really tasty lower carb tomato sauce.
Anytime I taste any jar sauce, it’s now inedible. Just like you said…it tastes more like a jam to me now…way too sweet.
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.
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.
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...
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).
I don't get why people would use flavour packets when making gravy, or why people would use corn starch.
Not saying it's wrong, but that it seems unneeded.
For example, let's say I fry up a pork chop. I may put 1/2 a spanish onion in the pan, and I'd definitely add some cayane pepper and mustard powder. Maybe some fresh garlic.
As the cooking nears completion, I'll add flour over everything, until all the juices and grease is absorbed.
At this point I want to brown the flour a little bit. My heat is little below medium, I want browned, not burned.
So, I try to flatten the flour against the cooking surface, spread it out, make sure it gets heat.
This takes maybe 4 minutes, with me making sure the flour gets moved around, re-flattened, mixed up a bit, so it all browns.
When ready, add in cold water. The amount is try-till-you-learn amount. If it starts out too thick, add more! Now set pan to full heat, and stir repeatedly.
When the water is hard boiling, keep stirring, making sure that during this entire process you are cleaning the bottom of the pan.
If you're using nonstick, instead of stainless or iron, you probably can't do this right. You need to scrape the pan here. You need to forcefully agitate. Right tool, right job.
You may need to turn the heat down a bit, as things thicken. Again, you need to start thin, make thick.
(When you first add the cold water, it will be very water like. Thin. But what happens is the flour breaks up, and makes it thick, so first timers will need a lot more water than they think.)
Two things will happen here. You will collect all the flavour from everything you have just cooked, and the gravy will start to thicken on its own.
No corn starch is required, or flavour packet. Full, lush, flavourful, thick gravy, no lumps, cold water is part of this, and the hard boil after.
It will take a few tries to get it right, but once learned, all things become gravy.
Note: thanks for lettimg me hang my comment here. Also hi.
I think this phenomenon started in USA with the "Betty Crocker" and "Bisquick" product line. This was marketed as easier than scratch cooking. There's nothing wrong with the concept (I'm sure there is a box of Bisquick in my kitchen), but it doesn't always make sense from a value standpoint. Also it is less flexible. You could apply the technique you describe no matter what you were cooking, and you could vary the timing and amounts a great deal. The "kit" stuff is more like a chemistry demonstration, which must be carried out fairly closely to the directions on the box in order to remain somewhat flavorful.
I think it really extends to everything, others have mentioned pre-made tomato sauces here, also baffling both for price and taste.
When I left home, pre-internet, and started grocery shopping for the first time, I recall wanting spagetti. Well ground meat, that made sense. Pepper. Salt. Noodles.
But until years later, I didn't think about the spagetti sauce I bought. I just kept buying it. It was just there, labelled as a natural ingredient.
You want to make spagetti? Why, there's the sauce!
In retrospect, I think labelling is quite effective in this way. Get 'em when first out of the house, latch on to their inexperience then.
Starch also has the nice property of tenderizing meat and locking in juices when used in a marinade, in a process called “velveting.” https://www.bonappetit.com/story/velveting-meat/amp
The traditional starch is water chestnut, and you can still buy it, but corn is a lot easier to turn into a starch.
In general, a lot of things went via the Pacific as well during the Columbian Exchange. East, Southeast, and South Asian looks very different without chilis, tomatoes, or sweet potatoes to name a few.
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.
However a little bit of milk already does the trick. No need for whatever sugars people throw in there. The Industrie would never use milk for several reasons.
Try making a traditional tomato sauce using canned tomatoes and follow the recipe exactly... then compare that to Prego or Ragu. The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively.
Most people don't eat enough low-cost, high-availability items like cucumbers and spinach, and they don't manage to learn how to do things like make their own bread, which is far superior fresh from the oven than anything you can get from a supermarket bakery. They also don't appreciate frozen vegetables, which are just as healthy as the fresh stuff, even if it might not taste quite as good some of the time.
One of the things that the Food Network did a HUGE disservice to people is that a couple of entire generations (Xers and Millennials) were 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. There was maybe one show on that entire network with a host who would use kits and flavor packets and other items, and she was regularly panned by the audience for not being "authentic" enough.