I’m currently making a lasagne.
I know how to make it and make it quite nicely.
Making a white sauce is easy but with the increase of gas and food, I’ve wondered if buying one is just as easy / cheap?
It would certainly save time and I should think I wouldn’t notice any difference in taste.
With the advent of Hello Fresh and that other one, are we as a nation, turning to convenience much more than cooking stuff from scratch?
46 comments
It costs about 3p in gas to make a lasagne.
you are cooking from scratch with Hello Fresh to be fair. you just get the ingredients portioned out for you
I’m lazy and generally can’t be bothered to cook that much, and I’m perfectly happy to use a jar of tomato sauce with some pasta as an easy meal though.
If I’m making a lasagne I’m doing it from scratch though (excluding the pasta). A white sauce is so easy and takes very little time, it’s the ragu with the serious cooking time
I make everything from scratch, never use ready made sauces, soups etc, and a bechemal sauce homemade tastes 💯% better
I cooked a gammon joint on Sunday in my slow cooker, then made pea & ham soup yesterday from the stock
I prefer to cook from scratch so I know exactly what has gone into what I’m eating. A lot of processed food has a lot of additives which I prefer to avoid as much as possible. Also I think homemade lasagne tastes much better than anything I’ve bought from a shop in the past.
Hello fresh is cooking from scratch, just cuts out having to shop and gives you the right portions of ingredients to make each meal. We have them sometimes as it’s a great way to discover new recipes
The white sauces in jars are crap, they just turn to nothing when baked. It costs very little in flour, butter and milk to get a sauce going (protip: make double or more, it freezes down and tends to be less likely to split). Some jarred sauces though are OK, the basic pasta sauces barely cost any more than just plain passata and have all the herbs and seasoning in them. Only really worth it if people are the types who make a recipe which need herbs and spices then just never use them again.
I batch cook lasagne and freeze the extra. Frozen pre-cooked lasagne microwaves well.
I live in a house with 5 other people because that’s all I can afford as a young person. I have neither the time nor the space to constantly cook from scratch, my housemates would become my enemies real quick.
It depends on your circumstances.
Tesco show a 6 serving [lasagne recipe that costs £1.71 per portion](https://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/simple-lasagne.html), total £10.26, though you have to [spend £22.77](https://tesco.list-integration.whisk.com/stateless-checkout?recipes=%5B%7B%22recipeUrl%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Frealfood.tesco.com%2Frecipes%2Fsimple-lasagne.html%22%7D%5D) to buy all the ingredients, and this may leave you with ingredients that you can’t or won’t end up using. If you wanted to scale the recipe down to make only one or two portions, you would have even more leftover ingredients.
Tesco’s cheapest ready made lasagne is the 1.4kg family version at [£5 each](https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/307741701). You would need two of these (£10) for the same quantity as the home made version. Clearly the price is the same, with no headache of extra ingredients to use up. Would the quality be the same? Unlikely. Would the kids notice? Again unlikely. Would you notice? Quite possibly.
For a high quality ready made lasagne, you are looking at [Charlie Bigham’s, one portion for £6](https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/291244404). If you only wanted one portion, this might actually work out cheaper than making your own because you wouldn’t have all the leftover flour, carrots, wine, etc that could easily end up getting thrown away. To avoid this expensive waste, you would have to plan your meals and cook regularly to ensure the spare ingredients all get used up.
So your question is worth pondering, but you really need to get into specifics to find out which option is most cost effective for you.
Cooking from scratch is better because you can tailor things to how your family like them. It isn’t full of chemicals. Cooking one lasagne takes the same oven time as cooking four, so you can freeze it in portions. A full freezer is more efficient than empty space.
Hello Fresh/Green Chef are from scratch cooking. They are delivering you the raw ingredients and a recipe card. At most you might get some pre-chopped vegetables.
I cook from scratch probably 4 or 5 times a week. Although arguably more, depends how you want to define it really.
One meal: bought pizza dough from a pizzeria, added my own sauce and toppings. Is that from scratch?
Another meal: stir fry using one of those supermarket meal deals where you get noodles, sauce and veg. Marinaded and cooked some tofu to add to it too. Is that from scratch?
White sauce in the jar sucks, I used it once and never again
I have coeliac so I have to make most things myself at home. People with food allergies/intolerance/coeliac disease do a lot of cooking from scratch!
Becky Excel’s gluten free cooking books are huge and get into the top 10 quite a lot. There’s only 1% of people in the UK with coeliac, and a few more who are gluten free for intolerance/IBS etc. So even if you say we’re 5% of the population, we’re buying enough specialist cooking books to get into the best seller lists.
I prefer to make it from scratch, you know exactly what goes inside, you can make batches, you can make it perfectly to your taste. The store-bought stuff tastes like crap and it doesn’t even come close to being tasty.
I live alone so when I make my vegetable stew, I make it for a whole week and can freeze it if I don’t fancy eating it every day (I typically do though). The cost is less than £15 (even if you include rice as I buy it in big bags in Indian shops_. You can’t get good vegetable stew that’s high quality, healthy and tasty for that low for entire week. It’s my lazy meal, just chop the veg, add spices and slow cook for a few hours. There’s no competition.
The reason many people don’t cook from scratch is not necessarily the price but time commitment and lack of knowledge how to make tasty and quick meals. Plenty of people still think that you can only make a salad with a lettuce base and it has to be tasteless.
Lidl do a family one for 3 pounds sixty it’s not bad.
It is most likely cheaper cooking batches of bechemel, Ragus etc. the Ingredients are very cheap
What you don’t pay for now, you will pay in your health later
I cannot imagine not being able to taste any difference between my own homemade lasagne and a shop bought one.
Not least, shop bought ones are much, much wetter than I make.
The better shop ones are about a fiver per serving and still need to go in the oven for 35-40 minutes, so I doubt there would be any huge saving.
I mean I think scratch cooking has been on the decline for decades and convenience foods have grown to fill that gap. The problem with Hello Fresh and the like is how expensive they are, you really do pay for the convenience. I think if you’re budget conscious enough to worry about the cost of utilities, then it’s not a viable alternative. It’s much cheaper to take some time to plan meals and buy from a cheaper supermarket whilst minimising waste and build up a small pantry, as well as learning to cook basic meals from scratch. There might be marginally more upfront cost in buying a bag of flour or some herbs and spices, but that pantry builds up and makes it cheaper per meal in the long run. There’s no long term saving in stuff like Hello Fresh.
That’s not to say it’s useless, just that HF serves a different purpose, which is basically as a time saving device. I’ve also heard it’s helped people build their skills and confidence in cooking, such that they can eventually stop relying on HF and cook more from scratch. So I don’t think it’s a binary choice between scratch cooking and convenience foods, I suspect most people do a mix of both and fall somewhere on the spectrum.
Not in my house, we have a freezer stocked with meat from the butchers, an organic veg box delivered each week and well stocked cupboards full of flour, grains, dried pasta, tinned tomatoes etc and a fridge full of various jarred ingredients. Apart from the odd frozen pizza when we’ve got home late, everything is made from scratch.
It takes a bit of time meal planning for the week but once that’s done it’s pretty straight forward with only minimal shopping needed for fresh stuff like cream etc.
Opposite I think, with how prices have jumped up people can’t afford ready meals so much these days.
I remember a few years back ready meals used to be so cheap they would fly off the shelves, now people are buying substantially less of them.
I like to cook from scratch most nights. I’m lucky to have the time and resource to do that, and that I grew up in a house that also mostly ate from scratch so I learned some recipes along the way. That doesn’t mean we don’t eat plenty of takeaway during the year, and will sometimes have things like premade pizza from the supermarket for dinner.
We don’t really buy jarred sauces these days as I like to keep an eye on my overall sodium intake. The closest for us would be buying those little curry paste pots that you can use to easily build up a curry sauce.
I don’t think it’s falling out of favour I think that people have less time and energy. Jobs are more pressure and even 9-5 jobs aren’t as 9-5 as they used to be, and pay less compared to years ago. I think things like Hello Fresh and other pre-prepared are popular because it doesn’t require as much effort as actually cooking from scratch, measuring out ingredients, etc
I am a good cook, but I hate cooking, I’ve used similar services to Hello Fresh and preferred it because I didn’t have to focus as hard on cooking. It was all there and I had 2 portions ready to go, which meant I had one for dinner and then lunch the next day.
I cook most things from scratch, BUT I buy Lasagne from M&S. You are right, it is much cheaper to buy it in than make it. We did exactly that last weekend. £8.25 to feed 4, versus the £11-ish it would be from scratch.
It isn’t nearly as nice, but: I was tired and honestly sometimes I just want a break from cooking 7 nights a week. We are on a tight budget and it gets pretty wearing – I am a bit sick of the sight of our cooker 😂
Hello Fresh is shite though.
Nah its still a lot cheaper and with correct planning really easy. Spent 26 quid last week on two chickens and associated veg. I ended up with 14 portions of food: chicken soup, fried rice, chicken and chickpea curry and fried chicken. £1.85 a portion.
I would assume with the state of the economy “scratch’ cooking” would be favourable – but who knows, when I was a kid I barely saw anyone obese and now most of the people I went to school with are either ripped to all fuck and gym obsesses or absolutely massive.. can’t imagine they’re getting to that size cooking home meals..
I am turning to what I call ‘assemble at home’ things a lot more, so I wouldn’t go and get a curry ready meal, but I’d be more inclined to buy a jar of sauce instead of making it from scratch like I use to, or those pre-assembled raw tray bakes, hunters chicken sort of thing. It’s not hard to do it from scratch but it’s more or less the same price than the individual ingredients now, and with only 2 of us on the house it just makes sense sometimes without having to put the time and effort in.
It also depends how from scratch you’re talking – I’m doing a roast tonight but I’m not making the yorkies from scratch but I am doing the roast potatos from scratch
I love cooking from scratch, and as often as possible, I do.
The difficulty these days is that people are time-poor, energy-poor and attention-poor – so people will find pre-prepared shortcuts simply because they’re knackered. I know that’s been me in recent years.
Meal prepping, planning and eating them through the week is one thing that keeps me sane
Let’s see the lasagne recipe!
I actually love doing it. The challenge of trying to make something I’ve not had before makes it worth the time and effort
I enjoy cooking but the amount of time it takes to cook from scratch is not worth doing more than a couple times a week. When I come home from work I want to be able to chill and do what I want and not cook for 1/2 hours.
A lasagne from scratch should not be tasting the same as a ready meal lasagne in my opinion.
I cook from scratch all the time, but I’m kind of forced to. My fiance has a good intolerance to alliums, which means that basically every pre-made sauce, most ready meals/preprepped stuff and even a lot of burgers and sausages and stuff like that are off limits to us. I like doing it but it would be nice to be able to just bung a lasagne in the oven after a full day at work.
I’m gonna argue you’re not cooking from scratch unless you’re also making the lasagne sheets yourself. Which is a lot more faff than most people want to be doing after work when they’re hungry.
I love to cook. None of my family does but I learned when I moved to university and got really into food and cooking. I’m having to eat a lot more ready-made food as we’ve moved into a renovation project and I don’t have a very good kitchen right now.
Cooking from scratch is 100% cheaper and nicer. And you can make stuff the way you like it – you don’t like spicy food? Leave the chillies out! Love mushrooms in lasagne for some reason? Stick them in! Like pears more than apples? Pear crumble it is!
Being able to cook is fucking brilliant.
For me the best ‘convenience’ foods are frozen vegetables, garlic and ginger. Not sure if that still counts from scratch but it’s made me 200% more likely to make a stir fry for lunch
I really enjoy cooking but I always have some ready meals on standby for when I purely cannot be fucked. I feel a lot more proud when I’ve done something from scratch and it’s banging but unless I’m sharing it with somebody it doesn’t matter. If it’s just me I’ll happily have a microwave meal
Hello Fresh isn’t convenient. It’s a hell of a lot more hassle following their recipes than making truly from scratch. We’ve got a few HF recipes and a simple meal requires measuring jug and 3 pans for starters….. Any other meal I may make (such as chilli) I’ll use one large pan for all the ingredients and meat. Another pan for rice. That chilli lasts 3 days, so 1 pan for 3 days making it 1 pan first 2 days and 2 pans the third day.
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I’d say laziness is more in favour.
I know how to cook from scratch. I have space for storing the ingredients and equipment, and time to do it. What I don’t have is the energy or physical capacity for some of the tasks (chronically ill & disabled), and there’s no financial fix for that. We did get Hello Fresh for a while, as my partner could follow their recipes with advice from me, but it was mildly frustrating for both of us. So I buy lasagne ready-made. It’s not as good as my own version, but I am still awake when it is cooked and ready to eat, a big plus.
(Yes, I’ve tried prepping in stages, freezing things, etc. When I do have the stamina to cook I try to freeze extra sauce, say, but there isn’t much leeway.)
I scratch could every lunch/dinner but can understand why people are put off.
Time constraints and cost are the biggest factors.
Too many people sadly can’t afford buying racks of spices and raw ingredients.
Then there’s cooking times, running your hobs/oven for ages at cost, and of course cleaning up at the end (1 microwaveable plate or a baking tray vs two pots and wiping down all the surfaces)
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It’s just a sign of the times and a response to changes in society I guess.
I don’t think so, scratch is healthier and tastier than shop bought. I also think there is a growing awareness around the downsides of ultra processed food. I am actually leaning further away from pre-made, a few months ago I started making my own bread, biscuits, desserts and ice-cream at home in addition to my meals so now I’d say 85% of what my family eat is made from scratch
We have less free time now than before so ofc people are cooking from scratch less you also have to consider the fact that girls didn’t go to school so their mums taught them how to cook and be a ” good wife”
That’s not to mention that food fresh food doesn’t last so if you’re cooking from fresh every day you either need to batch cook everything or go shopping several times a week for fresh ingredients and when you add that to the fact people are working longer it just becomes more difficult for people to cook from scratch
Vost of ingredient > tin/jar.