Ingredients are needed before you can cook. Some ingredients can be used for almost all dishes, while others are more specialized.
Some ingredients you will need to buy, but others you can easily make yourself. Here we take a closer look at the items you never need to buy again, as you can easily make them yourself.
1) Bearnaise essence
There is a fairly broad consensus that homemade bearnaise sauce tastes better than powdered sauce, yet most people tend to buy bearnaise essence, even though it is also easy to make yourself.
You only need white wine vinegar, white wine (or water), fresh tarragon, shallots, and a little salt, and the result can be frozen, for instance, in ice cube bags or trays, so you always have a bearnaise cube ready when you need to make your sauce.
For example, read a recipe for bearnaise essence here and if you want to know more about Sauce Bearnaise in general, then read here.
2) Pickled cucumbers and beets
If you are the type who almost always has pickled goods in your fridge, there is no reason why you shouldn’t make it yourself; the ingredients are few, and the final result has far more flavor than jars from the supermarket.
When you pickle, you need to make a brine that essentially consists of vinegar, water, and sugar, and then spices can be added to give your pickled ingredients more flavor.
We have, among others, a recipe for pickled cucumbers here and a recipe for pickled beets here. Read much more about pickling here.
3) Jam/preserves
We stay in the pickling world a bit, as sweet preserves are also easy to make yourself. We have a delicious recipe for plum preserves, but if you have a garden with other berries or fruits, they can just as easily be preserved into a delicious jam.
We have, among others, the following recipes:
- Plum preserves.
- Raspberry jam.
- Homemade ketchup.
- Strawberry rhubarb jam.
- Apple squash jam.
- Strawberry raspberry jam.
- Blackberry jam.
4) Bacon
Bacon is another thing that is easy to make yourself. It does require some time and preparation, but the result is a firmer, meatier bacon with a rich flavor that is worth all the time.
Moreover, homemade bacon is made by drawing moisture out of the meat when it is salted, so it also sputters less when fried.
We have, among others, a recipe for dry-cured bacon here. Read much more about bacon here.
5) Soup
One of the most classic soups in Danish cuisine is probably chicken soup with meat and flour dumplings, and therefore it also appears in several frozen varieties in the supermarket.
But if you want the true rich flavor, you get more out of boiling chicken and vegetables yourself so that the taste from all the ingredients is truly absorbed into the soup.
In addition, you will have a lot of leftover chicken meat, which you can subsequently use for, for example, tarts or pies.
For example, read a recipe for chicken soup here. Read much more about soups here.