What Does "Homemade" Mean To You?

TastyReuben

TastyReuben

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Thinking about this as I have a cake baking that started with a box mix, but I doctored up a little, and plan to top with homemade frosting.

What do you consider "homemade" to mean? There are a couple of different ways to interpret that.

First, in your own home kitchen: when you make a sauce staring with canned tomatoes, is that homemade? Is it 75% homemade? Disregarding that canned tomatoes are frequently superior to supermarket fresh tomatoes, how homemade would you consider it?

Or my cake; I started with a box mix of standard chocolate cake, but grated some dark chocolate into the batter, added some grand marnier and orange zest, and I made the frosting...is that 50% homemade, or is that being too generous?

Second, out on the road today, I drove by a "farmers' market" that really is nothing more than a storefront. They don't grow anything, they buy it all from suppliers, same as Kroger or any other market.

They had a sign up advertising "homemade fudge," and the fudge is packaged like a homemade product, but they didn't make it, they bought it from someone else and are merely reselling it. Would you think "homemade" in that sense should imply that the maker and the seller are one and the same?

Just musing while I wait for my homemade...er, home-baked cake to cool.
 
A sauce made by you, in your kitchen is homemade, whether you used fresh tomatoes or canned. Canned tomatoes are just tomatoes in a can, unless spices and herbs are added to make a canned tomato sauce.

Think about it this way, is a loaf of bread homemade if you didn't grind the wheat into flour yourself?

Using a cake mix to bake a cake at home is a grey area. Yeah, you baked it at home, but is it homemade? It will surely be fresher than a store bought cake that may be a few days old. (?)

As for that "homemade fudge," perhaps "small batch" would be a better term, as opposed to factory made. (?)

CD
 
We're having beef manhattans for supper, because I was pantry shopping and found a jar of supermarket gravy. I'm going to homemade it up with some fresh thyme from the garden and a splash of red wine. 😏
 
It's a matter of degrees. How homemade something is depends on how much work was done by you in your own home. So the question then becomes, at what point on this sliding scale do we agree that some has enough homemade-ness to be called homemade?

And to that, I think its a matter of how realistic it would be do those things yourself. Most people don't raise their own livestock, press their own olives, or mill their own wheat, and so buying meat, oil, and flour from the grocery still counts as homemade. But this makes it all subjective as one person's insurmountable task is another person's weekend project.

So, alas, we must live in a world where if somebody tells you they made "homemade" chicken noodle soup, you won't be able to know with absolute certainty what that means. Such is the cruelty of life.

Now on the topic of commercial goods being labelled as "homemade", I put that right along side restaurants who put "world famous" on their menus. It's just marketing fluff, not meant to be taken seriously.
 
NailBat said:
It's a matter of degrees. How homemade something is depends on how much work was done by you in your own home. So the question then becomes, at what point on this sliding scale do we agree that some has enough homemade-ness to be called homemade?

And to that, I think its a matter of how realistic it would be do those things yourself. Most people don't raise their own livestock, press their own olives, or mill their own wheat, and so buying meat, oil, and flour from the grocery still counts as homemade. But this makes it all subjective as one person's insurmountable task is another person's weekend project.

So, alas, we must live in a world where if somebody tells you they made "homemade" chicken noodle soup, you won't be able to know with absolute certainty what that means. Such is the cruelty of life.

Now on the topic of commercial goods being labelled as "homemade", I put that right along side restaurants who put "world famous" on their menus. It's just marketing fluff, not meant to be taken seriously.
Click to expand...
Always kill me in the commercials when they are making some that is mass produced and they show someone with a chefs jacket making it in a kitchen with a 2 quart pot.
 
A good question. We eat tons of pasta in my house and there´s always "homemade" tomato sauce in the fridge. I usually make it with fresh tomatoes, fresh garlic and fresh herbs from the kitchen garden, but sometimes, I´ll use tinned tomatoes. It´s still homemade. What´s NOT homemade is when you buy a tin of Florentina Salsa Napolitana in the supermarket and pour it over your spaghetti.
Some food items are simply kitchen staples - oils, olives, nut butters, flours, spices, vinegars, and sauces like soy, oyster sauce, even ketchup, so they wouldn´t count for me. However, if you´re making, for example, a Chicken Tikka Masala, and you buy the masala sauce ready made, or use Curry powder, garlic powder, onion powder, I´d say your dish is not homemade. I think it´s all about control perhaps. If you use fresh tomatoes, fresh onions, and fresh garlic, you can control what flavour you want a bit more, whereas if everything is supermarket-bought, you´re stuck with what you´ve got.
 
Anything I made from scratch I consider homemade, that excludes things made with meal kits, pre made sauces, or supermarket cake mixes.
I always state it if I didn't do the work from scratch, if not with the meal picture then in the grocery shopping list I posted of that week. I often buy frozen french fries , so I won't say they're homemade unless they specifically are.
As for convience items, I have a few jars of curry sauce for chronic pain days, a few ready made pizza doughs in the freezer , fish fingers and often some non homemade dessert on hand.
But usually, I do really make everything from scratch including my baking. Just not bread currently, though I am wanting to get to learning that.

I consider items that are very basic and not flavored or added to (like those tinned tomatoes you mentioned TastyReuben ) the exeption to this. They are just a natural unchanged product to add to a dish. It doesn't count as homemade anymore when it's a ready made sauce instead of just tomatoes.
 
Cookingbites is world wide, a large community but a limited number of people discussing homemade. If this were to be discussed worldwide in its literal sense would it not go the same way as health and safety, imagine a child selling homemade cakes outside her home is arrested because she did not grind the flour.
 
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here's my take on home made tomato sauce:

Step 1: pick the tomatoes
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Step 2: pot them
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Step 3: go simmer
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Step 4: use or freeze
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for gravy, alas I must succumb to the lab. I can make very nice stuff, but it starts with a roux / light / dark / brick - and the fat and calorie count is out of my orbit.

but I have my tricks. I boil, briefly, some dried mushroom - many types, morel is a fav.
use the 'liquor' from the mushrooms to make the packet gravy, add diced fresh 'stuff' of many sorts, or pan drippings
packet gravy has little to no fat, minimal calories, and if you put some lipstick on it, tastes pretty good.
 
CookieMonster said:
for gravy, alas I must succumb to the lab. I can make very nice stuff, but it starts with a roux / light / dark / brick - and the fat and calorie count is out of my orbit.

but I have my tricks. I boil, briefly, some dried mushroom - many types, morel is a fav.
use the 'liquor' from the mushrooms to make the packet gravy, add diced fresh 'stuff' of many sorts, or pan drippings
packet gravy has little to no fat, minimal calories, and if you put some lipstick on it, tastes pretty good.
Click to expand...

When I make a gravy, it is usually to go on top of something like chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and fried okra, so the fat in the gravy is irrelevant. My arteries are going to beg for mercy with or without the gravy.

CD
 
I'm prolly the most "home made " person on this site.? We have a full garden and grow most veges, tomatoes are grown and made into home made sauce/ ketchup, preserved in bottles up to
15 X 1 litre bottles. Then I make pasta sauce from herbs picked in our garden made up and put into 2 litre ice cream tubs and frozen. All herbs are dried and from our garden.
I'm making a lamb casserole ATM, with sauce from about two years ago. I have two cupboards full of plum sauce as well. Curried onions I've made, along with relish raspberry jams and coulis, strawberry jams and coulis. Pickled gerkins/ pickles.
I'm third generation of doing preserving and making my own jams etc.
It's not because of money, I have plenty, but it's just a desire to make my own. I also do swaps for other stuff, like my friend who swaps his crayfish with my pickles, because his wife loves mine so much. She eats a couple every day.
No one in my family HAVE ever made a cake from a packet.!!

Russ
 
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