10 Things We Recommend You Make Instead of Buy

This is one of our favorite condiments to make from scratch and can easily become one of yours. If you’re a home cook, there’s a likely chance that you have many of the ingredients called for in homemade dressings—such as mustard, vinegar, and extra-virgin olive oil—already hiding in your cupboard. Also, making your own dressing ensures that it contains few or no additives and preservatives, which is something you can't always be sure of with store-bought versions. 

While all of that is dandy, our favorite reason to make homemade salad dressing is that it’s normally cheaper. Who doesn’t like low prices paired with great flavors?

A Few of Our Favorite Salad Dressing Recipes

• Catalina Salad Dressing
• Creamy Blue Cheese Dressing
• Low-Fat Ranch Dressing
• Creamless Creamy Green Goddess Dressing
• Creamless Creamy Roasted Red Pepper and Tahini Dressing

Yes, you can buy different kinds of seasonings at the grocery store, but why settle for dusty premade mixes when you can make a fresher, tastier blend yourself? In the test kitchen, we've found that it’s easy to make your own versions at home with dried herbs and spices you may already have on hand.

A Few of Our Favorite Spice Blend Recipes

• Homemade Italian Seasoning
• Homemade Sazón
• Homemade Poultry Seasoning
• Sesame-Orange Spice Blend
• Homemade Pumpkin Pie Spice
• Jerk-Style Spice Rub
• Cajun Spice Rub
• Chile-Cumin Spice Rub

Ice cream is something most home cooks just don’t mess with in their kitchens. It’s as if there’s an unwritten rule that we shouldn’t attempt to make our own ice cream. This thought must exist, because there are already countless options at the supermarket that are much more inviting than whatever you could possibly whip up at home. Or maybe it’s because taking on such a task as making ice cream is asking for disaster—the chances of you getting the right consistency or having the right tools on hand to make this delightful treat are quite low. Right? Wrong.

We’ve proven these theories false with a few of our favorite ice cream recipes developed in our test kitchen. And guess what? You don’t need expensive, fancy tools to make something better than what you can find at the supermarket.

A Few of Our Favorite Ice Cream Recipes 

• No-Churn Orange Ice Cream
• Easy Chocolate Ice Cream
• Magic Chocolate Swirl Ice Cream
• Ginger Ice Cream with Chocolate Sauce
• Magic Vanilla Ice Cream
• Magic Strawberry Ice Cream

Nuts are expensive, so it’s especially disappointing when you buy a batch of spiced nuts that doesn’t measure up to your standards. Through our recipe development for spiced nuts, we learned that the best recipes produce nuts that are crisp and evenly coated with spices. Oh, and they don’t turn soggy after a day or two. Our nut recipes fulfill both of these requirements.

A Few of Our Favorite Spiced/Candied Nut Recipes

• Crunchy Spiced Nuts
• Spiced Nuts
• Barbecued Spiced Nuts
• Curried Spiced Nuts
• Asian Spiced Nuts
• Chili-Lime Spiced Nuts

Homemade lemonade is refreshing, invigorating, and much better than store-bought. It’s also easier to make than you probably think. We know that it’s easy to just reach for bottled lemonades in the grocery store beverage case, but unfortunately, many of these cheek-sucking versions are packed with sugar, flavorings, and colors and not much else (often they don’t even contain real lemon juice). With our homemade versions, you get fragrant, bright, and fresh lemonade without any bitterness or unwanted artificial flavors.

A Few of Our Favorite Lemonade Recipes 

• Raspberry Lemonade               
• Strawberry-Lime Lemonade
• Cucumber-Mint Lemonade
• Watermelon Lemonade
• Lemonade

The choice between a bowl of creamy, plump, pleasantly chewy slow-cooked steel-cut oatmeal and the gummy stuff you get from those just-add-water packets is a no-brainer. Or at least it should be. We get it: You want something quick and easy in the morning. But through our recipe development, we’ve learned that when making oatmeal, speed often trumps quality. When it comes to quality, you should never settle.

A Few of Our Favorite Oatmeal Recipes

• Blueberry and Almond Oatmeal
• Toasted Coconut Oatmeal
• Banana and Brown Sugar Oatmeal
• Raisin and Brown Sugar Oatmeal
• Peaches and "Cream" Oatmeal

There’s nothing worse than getting a dip from the supermarket that’s chalky or bland and doesn’t meet your needs. Don’t worry—our homemade dip recipes won't disappoint. Whether you’re looking for a Buttermilk-Peppercorn Dip to serve the kiddies after school or a Garlic and Rosemary White Bean Dip to snack on as you watch your favorite show this weekend, the recipes below will be easy and perfect for you.

A Few of Our Favorite Dip Recipes

• Buttermilk-Peppercorn Dip
• Garlic and Rosemary White Bean Dip
• Creamy Herb Dip
• Sun-Dried Tomato and Feta White Bean Dip
• Hot Spinach and Artichoke Dip
• Neiman Marcus (Inspired) Dip

Baking good bread can be a challenge, but with time, the right formula, and the right tools on hand, you’re destined for success. All our bread recipes show you how to get bread just as crusty (or soft), chewy, and flavorful as the kind you leap over the table for at your favorite restaurant. Yes, some bread recipes require more work and more time, but they’re worth it.

A Few of Our Favorite Bread Recipes 

• Monkey Bread
• Almost No-Knead Bread
• Cheesy Garlic Bread
• Spicy Cheese Bread
• English Muffin Bread
• Bagel Bread
• Prosciutto Bread

In the test kitchen, we believe that every freezer should be filled with homemade chicken stock so that you can easily access it for soups, stews, pan sauces, or any recipe that needs a rich, deep, meaty base of flavor.

Really, nothing beats homemade chicken stock. It tastes better than even the best store-bought broth, and it can be made with ingredients that you’re used to throwing away. In this case, that’s chicken bones. Here’s another advantage to making your own stock: It can be frozen for up to two months so that you can use it at your leisure.  

A Few of Our Favorite Stock Recipes

• Slow-Cooker Chicken Stock
  
• Simple Turkey Stock
• The Ultimate Vegetable Stock
• Quick Homemade Chicken Stock
• Classic Fish Stock

Making nut butter at home really couldn’t be any simpler. Our fellow test cooks over at our sister site Cook’s Illustrated developed a few nut butter recipes in which they used a food processor to grind the nuts into a paste. 

While creating this recipe, they learned that pecan and hazelnut butters needed to be thickened after grinding to give them a spreadable consistency—that’s because both nuts have more fat than the other varieties they tested. Check out one of their recipes below to see what ingredient they used to thicken these runny kinds of nut butter.

A Few Of Our Favorite Nut Butter Recipes (from Cook's Illustrated)

• Homemade Peanut Butter
• Homemade Hazelnut Butter
• Homemade Cashew Butter
• Homemade Almond Butter
• Homemade Pecan Butter
• Homemade Pistachio Butter