Once you start reading ingredient lists, you begin noticing which things are worth making at home. Not everything, and the shop versions are mostly fine. But a handful are so much better homemade that it is hard to go back.
These three come up again and again, because they are the ones where the gap between the jar and the kitchen is widest, and where the homemade version takes almost no time.
01. Mustard vinaigrette
A jar from the shop can run to twenty ingredients. Yours is five, and it takes about thirty seconds.
One part vinegar or lemon juice to three parts olive oil. A teaspoon of dijon mustard, a pinch of salt, a good grind of pepper.
Put it all in a jar with a lid and shake it hard. The mustard is not only there for flavour, it is what holds the oil and the vinegar together, so do not skip it.
It keeps a week in the fridge. It will separate as it sits, which is normal, so shake it again before you use it. If it goes solid, that is the olive oil setting in the cold. Leave it on the bench for ten minutes.
Variations worth trying: a teaspoon of honey or maple if the vinegar is sharp. A crushed garlic clove. Red wine vinegar, sherry vinegar, or lemon for something lighter. Swap a third of the olive oil for tahini and you have something entirely different and very good over roasted vegetables.
02. Toasted muesli
The one where you notice the difference most, because shop granola is often closer to dessert than breakfast.
Three cups of rolled oats. A cup and a half of whatever nuts and seeds you like, roughly chopped. Two tablespoons of a neutral oil, and two tablespoons of maple syrup or honey.
Mix it all together, spread on a tray, and bake at 160C for about twenty minutes with a stir halfway through. Watch it near the end, since it goes from golden to burnt quickly.
Add dried fruit after it comes out and has cooled, not before, or it turns to leather in the oven.
You control the sweetness, which is what separates muesli from dessert. Two tablespoons of maple across the whole batch is a fraction of what most commercial granola carries. Start there and adjust to your taste rather than to a recipe.
It keeps a few weeks in an airtight jar, though it rarely gets the chance.
03. Homemade hummus
Two minutes in a food processor, and no preservatives required, because you are going to eat it this week.
A drained tin of chickpeas, keeping the liquid. Two tablespoons of tahini, the juice of a lemon, a small clove of garlic, half a teaspoon of salt. Blend, then add the chickpea liquid a splash at a time until it loosens to what you want.
Two things make the difference between fine hummus and very good hummus. Blend it longer than feels necessary, three or four minutes, since that is what makes it smooth rather than grainy. And use the chickpea liquid rather than water, because it emulsifies and makes it creamier.
If you have the patience, slipping the skins off the chickpeas gets you to something silky. It takes ten minutes and it is a reasonable thing to do in front of the television.
It keeps about five days in the fridge with a layer of olive oil over the top.
Worth knowing that tahini brings a useful amount of calcium, which is a good thing to have on hand if you are not big on dairy.
A caveat, because this argument gets pushed too far
A long ingredient list is not automatically a bad sign.
A food carrying twenty vitamins and minerals will have a long list by necessity, and that tells you nothing about its quality. Neither does the presence of an ingredient you cannot pronounce, since ascorbic acid is vitamin C and tocopherol is vitamin E.
The question is never how many ingredients there are. It is what they are, and why they are there.
These three are worth making yourself because the homemade version is better and faster than you would expect, not because the shop versions are dangerous. Most of them are perfectly fine. Yours will just taste better and cost less.
The takeaway: A vinaigrette is five ingredients and thirty seconds. Muesli lets you set the sweetness, which is the difference between breakfast and dessert. Hummus takes two minutes and the chickpea liquid is the trick. None of this is about avoiding packaged food, it is about noticing the handful of things where making it yourself is genuinely easier and better.
The science behind this post:
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Australian Food Composition Database. Calcium content of tahini and sesame seeds. foodstandards.gov.au
- National Health and Medical Research Council. Nutrient Reference Values for Australia and New Zealand: Calcium. The Recommended Dietary Intake is 1000mg per day for women aged 19 to 50 and 1300mg from age 51. nrv.gov.au
- Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.4: Information requirements relating to food identification. Ingredients must be listed in descending order of ingoing weight. foodstandards.gov.au