I finally stopped pretending I like making things from scratch

Okay, so I need to confess something that is going to make at least a third of you close this tab and the other two-thirds feel weirdly vindicated.

I don’t like making things from scratch. I never really did. I just really, really liked the idea of being someone who does.

There’s a difference — and it took me an embarrassing amount of flour, one deceased sourdough starter named Gerald, and a full sheet pan of granola that sat on my counter for eleven days before I threw it away to figure that out.

Was it ever actually about the food?

Honestly? No. It was about the aesthetic of making food.

There’s this version of yourself you can build in your head — the person who wakes up on Saturday and just casually throws together a loaf of bread. Who has a cast iron pan that looks like it’s been in the family since the Gold Rush. Who says things like “I just whipped this up” and means it.

I wanted to be her so bad.

The actual act of making bread from scratch — the waiting, the sticking, the why is it not rising — that part? Not for me. Never was.

Why did the sourdough era hit so different?

Because everyone was doing it, and collective delusion is powerful.

There was a specific window — you know the one — where every single person I followed online was keeping a sourdough starter alive like it was a pet. Naming it. Talking about its “personality.” Posting photos of their cross-sections like they’d discovered fire.

I did it three times. Three. Gerald the First died in week two. Gerald the Second made it almost a month before I left town for a long weekend and came back to something I won’t describe in detail. Gerald the Third I threw out preemptively because I could see where it was going.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: sourdough from scratch takes actual skill built over actual time. It’s not a weekend project. It’s a lifestyle. And I don’t want that lifestyle.

What’s actually wrong with buying the good stuff?

Absolutely nothing — and I say that as someone who spent way too long acting like the grocery store bread aisle was a personal failure.

There are bakers who have spent years learning exactly how to make a great loaf. They did the work. They have the skills. When I buy their bread, I’m not cheating — I’m letting someone who is genuinely good at a thing do the thing. That seems like the correct economic and moral decision.

The same goes for granola, pasta sauce, pie crust, and whatever else Pinterest has convinced you to make from scratch on a Tuesday night when you could just be sitting down.

The granola is what broke me

I made three batches. Three separate batches of granola that I was absolutely convinced I was going to eat for breakfast every day like a person who has their life together.

Batch one I burned. Batch two was fine but weirdly savory. Batch three was genuinely okay — the right crunch, the right sweetness, cooling on a sheet pan on my counter — and I looked at it and thought: I am never going to eat this. I am going to buy a bag of Nature Valley and be happy.

And I did. And I was.

Is there a version of from-scratch cooking I actually like?

Yeah, actually — and this is where I want to be fair to the whole thing, because there are people who genuinely love it and I respect that deeply.

Making a good pasta sauce on a Sunday when I have nothing else to do? That I like. Roasting a chicken because the whole process smells amazing and requires minimal babysitting? Sure. The things that are mostly hands-off and pay off in an obvious way — those I get.

What I don’t get is the suffering-as-virtue thing. The idea that food only counts, only means something, only proves you’re a good person if it was hard to make. America’s Test Kitchen actually ran a whole series on this — the punchline being that some of the best results in their blind tastings were store-bought. Turns out people can’t always tell. And the ones who claim they can are usually performing something too.

What I actually learned from the whole era

This is the part where I could pretend I walked away with some deep wisdom about authenticity and knowing yourself.

And okay — a little bit, yeah.

I spent a lot of time doing things in the kitchen not because they made me happy or fed anyone better, but because I wanted to be seen a certain way. Even when the only audience was me. That’s a weird thing to reckon with. You don’t always realize you’re performing when nobody’s watching — but sometimes you are, and the granola on the counter is the tell.

I wrote a little about that whole compare-yourself-to-the-highlight-reel problem a while back and it applies here too. We absorb what we see online and then quietly punish ourselves for not matching it.

Store-bought is not a moral failing. But what do I know?

I still cook. I like cooking. I made a really solid sheet pan dinner last week that I was genuinely proud of, and it involved exactly zero steps that felt like homework.

The scratch-cooking era taught me one thing worth keeping: I know which parts of making food I actually enjoy and which parts I was just doing for the imaginary person watching me do them. That’s not nothing.

But Gerald is gone. And I’m not bringing him back.

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