Article

Ditch the Store: Make Your Favorite Processed Foods at Home (for Less!)

Published on Wednesday, July 09, 2025
by Caitie G

Nutrition

The Real Benefits of Cooking at Home: It’s About More Than Saving Money

The Benefits of Cooking at Home: Beyond Cost Savings

The benefits of cooking at home are vast and seemingly endless. Aside from making healthier choices, cooking at home allows you to tap into your inner chef and further develop your cooking abilities. Similarly, it is a great activity to do with loved ones, whether you are teaching a child how to navigate the kitchen and healthy foods, or cooking with your roommates. Perhaps the biggest perk is knowing what you’re eating. In a world full of conveniences, shelf-stable and preserved foods have become the norm. Unfortunately, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not our biggest ally and still has a lot of work to help make our food safe (re: finally banning Red No. 3 in 2025 despite the European Union banning this dye in the 1990s).

Cooking at home with single ingredients gives you direct control over what goes into your body. You might be thinking, ‘but I burn pasta’, and yes, some skill development is needed to succeed with home cooking. Still, ultimately, the freshness, nutritional value, and quality of food you make at home far exceed that bought at stores or restaurants. Have you ever tried store-bought garlic powder and then made your own? The difference in potency and flavor could send someone into a coma. Let’s explore some easy foods you can make at home; class is in session!

Easy Homemade Versions of Common Processed Foods

One of the easiest foods to make yourself is crackers. These crunchy snacks come together with a few ingredients, minimal tools required, and can be done without waiting for yeast to rise. The difference is staggering if you compare a homemade cracker recipe to the ingredient list on the back of store-bought crackers. For example, this recipe from The Kitchn uses five ingredients. Original Ritz crackers come in at a whopping 17 ingredients, many of which are hard to pronounce and even harder to understand the function of (or the long-term effects of!).

If you’ve ever tried Chewy granola bars and have been largely unimpressed, making your own granola bars at home allows for complete customization of flavors and a healthier product. If you have oats, seeds, and a nut butter in your pantry, then you are ready to rock and roll. Incorporating only seven ingredients, these granola bars from Love and Lemons are quick, healthy, and the ingredients are flexible. Swap out the cashews for your favorite nut type, use a local raw honey, omit the chocolate chips if that’s not your jam…. The possibilities are endless.

A 2025 goal of mine is to forgo purchasing any salad dressings. Even though salad dressings can be surprisingly intimidating, once you get a recipe down, it is so easy and quick to replicate. There are also ingredients that just will always go together. For example, mix together some olive oil with a squeeze of lemon, a pinch of salt, and a sprinkle of garlic powder (bonus points if you make your own!). A scoop of Dijon mustard also pairs great with a good olive oil and red wine vinegar, and goes best with a crisp veggie-filled bean salad. Once you get familiar with good pairings, it becomes easier to whip up a dressing on the spot, often using ingredients you probably already have.

Bread is another super-easy, make-ahead item you can keep on hand all week. While sourdough is very intimidating, many bread recipes out there use quick yeast instead and create the same crunchy yet light texture. Making your own bread is a great way to eliminate added sugars, avoid preservatives, and keep your kitchen smelling like a bakery. If you are already a sourdough pro and maintain your own starter, all you really need is flour, water, and salt. If you prefer to take baby steps, non-fermented breads also have few ingredients, and most do not require a long rise time. Check out Preppy Kitchen for great artisan bread recipes. Pro tip: make sure your yeast is not expired, and if a recipe calls for warmed yeast, try your best to get the water temperature as close to 110 degrees Fahrenheit as possible (any cooler may not activate the yeast properly, any hotter may damage the yeast).

Easy Homemade Versions of Popular Snacks

Snack aisles at the grocery store are very alluring and enticing, with fun colors, wild flavors (looking at you, Lays, with your wasabi ginger potato chips), and frequent low prices. However, the trade-off is an extensive amount of artificial ingredients and preservatives. Making your own chips at home can be challenging, but some options are easier than others. Similar to the earlier discussion about making your own crackers, it is pretty simple to make your own Cheez-Its! Original Cheez-Its contain vegetable oils, which are inflammatory in nature, as they contain a high concentration of soybean oil, which is an omega-6 fatty acid (i.e., the ones we don’t want too much of). Compare that to this homemade Cheez-It recipe from Good Food Stories, which includes only five ingredients, one of which is water. Surprisingly, these homemade Cheez-Its are pretty easy to make.

Popcorn is also such an easy swap. Aside from being cheaper, the cooking process is a fun one! Remember that game where you’d twist the crank on a box and a clown would pop out? Making popcorn at home is similar. Start by adding oil to a pan and gently bring it up to a medium temperature. Add two popcorn kernels as a test; once they start popping, the oil is hot enough and ready to roll. Add the desired amount of kernels and a lid; otherwise, prepare for projectiles! Plan for about ten minutes start-to-finish, and top with salt or any seasoning of your choosing.

Store-bought fruit snacks are unfortunately packed full of food dyes, added sugars, and often lack real vitamins and minerals. Making your own fruit snacks allows you to take complete control of the ingredients and eliminate all of the not-so-good additives. This can also be a sneaky way to include some vegetables, such as beets or zucchini. Check out this recipe from JoyFoodSunshine; these fruit snacks are naturally sweetened, naturally colored, and easy to make.

Tips for Success

The planning and preparing phase of meal planning is by far the most important. When you are ready to try making some foods from scratch, consider trying one recipe at a time and even potentially scaling the recipe down. You may have to try it out a few times before you get it just right, and the taste may initially be a bit off-putting. But know this: once you start eating your own food and cutting out preservatives and artificial sweeteners, you start to crave the taste, and feel not-so-great when you return to the processed ingredients.

Once you’ve got a recipe down and feel confident with the process, consider batch cooking. Most foods can be made and frozen (or freeze-dried, canned) to extend the shelf life. Bread loaves, in particular, are easy to batch cook and then freeze. Make sure you pay attention to the shelf life listed in whichever recipe you use, especially if you are cooking with dairy products. In general, most homemade foods will be good for upwards of five days. Homemade garlic and other spices can sit on the shelf for 8+ months while still retaining freshness. Grab some adhesive labels next time you are at the store to best keep track of dates. Similarly, save jars once you finish sauces, jellies, pickles, etc. Once you start making most of your food from scratch, for some reason, you never have enough storage containers.

Several ingredients are always good to keep on hand: baking powder or baking soda, a good kosher salt, active dry yeast, flour, organic cane sugar, vanilla, raw honey (raw = more beneficial probiotics!), lemons, garlic, and olive oil, to name a few. The good news is that once you start cooking from scratch, the grocery list tends to get smaller as you will primarily shop for single ingredients only. There are dozens of food bloggers who specialize in homemade and scratch cooking; consider an initial internet search to find some you’d like to follow or recipes you’d like to try. Having a good, trusted internet source (and having faith in yourself) is the key to success!