Kitchen shortcuts you just won’t take

16 Comments

• veronicafrance  on  April 29, 2026

  Pastries I will buy: filo and all-butter puff pastry (life’s too short). Any other pastry I make myself — it’s vastly superior to ready-made. And ready-made pie fillings? Definitely not!

  I agree with you about spinach. I love young leaves in salad, or just wilted at the last minute in a soup, but for cooking, mature leaves are fine.

• debakken  on  April 29, 2026

  My go-to salad mix is a clamshell of organic baby spinach and baby arugula, but yes to mature spinach for cooking. I also disagree with the Serious Eats editors on boxed brownie mix–scratch is better but sometimes in a pinch a box of the right brand is just fine, especially served warm with ice cream.

  I agree with the editors on: no minute rice (the texture is just wrong), only fresh lemon juice, and make your own pancake mix (the King Arthur Baking recipe with malted milk powder is fabulous).

• London_Mummy  on  April 29, 2026

  I believe in moderation in everything – sometimes a shortcut makes the difference between cooking a homemade meal or eating a readymeal, and the former is usually much healthier & cheaper. I don’t believe it is realistic to apply dinner party standards to your daily family meals if you work outside the home, have caring responsibilities, or are unwell. I am a huge fan of frozen chopped onions, frozen puréed garlic, frozen puréed ginger, tinned tomatoes, ready-rolled pastry, and readymade breads & flatbreads for these reasons. As they say, “Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.”

• lean1  on  April 29, 2026

  Pancake mix, jarred garlic and jarred Lemon juice.

• vickster  on  April 29, 2026

  I agree with all the Serious Eats selections. I am glad to hear somebody mention spinach. I buy baby spinach for smoothies, but it does have no flavor and I vastly prefer mature leaves for cooking.

• anya_sf  on  April 29, 2026

  Puff pastry and filo – absolutely. Pie crust – no (well, almost never). I actually think boxed pancake mix can be okay, but I don’t buy it. Also some brownie mixes – but again, I’m not going to buy them, as I love to bake from scratch. That said, I might buy them when on vacation at a rental house. But I will never, ever buy yellow cake mix. I used to work for a food manufacturer on cake mix and will never get over the “yellow cake flavor”.

• FuzzyChef  on  April 30, 2026

  I will buy pie crust for some things, but that’s from a bakery where its real butter pie crust.

  I don’t get precut anything because i can use a knife. Someday, though, when my arthritis is worse? I might.

• MollyB  on  April 30, 2026

  I’m in agreement with most of the Serious Eats list, though I think it’s a little harsh on baby spinach. I rely on it for a quick weeknight salad or adding a quick-cooking vegetable to some pasta dish or soup, but would use mature spinach in any dish where spinach was the main component. I would add refrigerated “fresh” pasta to the “won’t buy” list. The plastic packages of tortellini and ravioli are always disappointing, with a sort of too-thick, leathery texture. Frozen tortellini and ravioli are so much better.

• Fyretigger  on  April 30, 2026

  For most uses I use The Ginger People’s jarred minced ginger (huge jar from Costco). I only buy fresh if I need coins for recipe. Peeling ginger is just too much of a pain.

• FJT  on  April 30, 2026

  When you have coeliac disease there aren’t that many shortcuts you can take. I’m even going to try making gluten free filo pastry from scratch because I haven’t had any in the 20 years since diagnosis, but maybe only once if rolling it out is a complete pain! I was just thinking about whether jarred minced garlic would be better for me with arthritis in my thumbs, but I’d probably struggle to get the jar open, so I’ll just continue using fresh garlic!

• KatieK1  on  April 30, 2026

  Bang the edge of the jar on the floor to loosen the seal.

• annmartina  on  April 30, 2026

  I used to take almost no shortcuts. But since COVID and recent hip replacement surgery I’ve become the shortcut queen and it kind of breaks my heart. I’m wondering if I’ll ever find my way back to my previous standards

• KarenGlad  on  May 2, 2026

  Standards schmandards …if it means the difference between purchased premade and almost homemade I’m in. Even though retired I don’t always have the time or energy to do everything from scratch. And those little jar opener tools that grab the lip of a jar lid and break the seal….best stocking stuffer ever received.

• sanfrannative  on  May 5, 2026

  Frozen or pie crust mix. Jarlic, never ever ever! I usually don’t even like store-bought rolls. My favorite refrigerator rolls are easy enough!

• gamulholland  on  May 5, 2026

  The frozen ginger cubes you can get at Trader Joe’s are great, and while we love to bake, we have kids whose classmates don’t exactly have discriminating palates and who leave half the pan of treats anyway, so baking for kid activities = Ghirardelli triple-chocolate brownie mix done right: not an 8×8 (we use a 9×13 pan), cooked for a lot less time (we start checking at 25-30 minutes). They’re shallower, so you don’t have the problem with the outer pieces being cooked into hockey puck levels of hardness by the time the interior pieces finally aren’t like goo. The 9×13 makes it all a lot more even.

• Pennyc07  on  May 29, 2026

  This week I bought some clamshell spinach as well as regular…and the regular was wilted and looking awful within two days!