Pantry Items You Can Make From Scratch

Many baked goods, such as cakes and biscuits, owe their light and fluffy texture to the addition of baking powder. It is not to be confused with baking soda — which is also used to give rise to cakes and pastries — and should not be used interchangeably. Instead, baking soda is used to make baking powder.

Baking powder is a mixture of baking soda, an acid, and an anti-caking agent. Food Network explains that when baking powder is mixed into a batter or dough, water activates the acid — which in turn reacts with the baking soda to produce gasses that leaven the product. To make baking powder, simply mix cream of tartar with baking soda and cornstarch.

However, there are differences to note when using homemade baking powder. According to Martha Stewart, most commercial baking powders are double-acting and react twice during the baking process: first when mixed with a liquid and a second time when exposed to the oven's high temperatures. This second reaction is due to the use of chemicals like sodium aluminum sulfate in store-bought baking powders. Homemade baking powder, on the other hand, is single-acting. This means that it is less likely to impart a metallic flavor to your bakes, but it's also less effective if you leave your dough or batter out for too long before baking. When using the homemade version, it is best to bake your goods as soon as they are mixed.

Another type of flour with a straightforward name, self-rising flour does exactly what it advertises — it allows baked goods to rise without the need to mix in additional leaveners. Invented in the 1800s as a way to allow British sailors to have access to fresh bread on long voyages without the use of yeast, self-rising flour is a combination of flour, baking powder, and salt (via Bob's Red Mill). These days, it is especially common in Southern recipes, such as biscuits and cornbread.

It is simple to make your own self-rising flour — combine all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt. However, Food Network notes that most commercial self-rising flour brands, such as the popular White Lily brand, are made with lower-protein flours. To achieve tender and delicate results that are more similar to those made with store-bought self-rising flour, use half all-purpose flour and half cake flour with the other ingredients instead.

Gone are the days when peanut butter was the only option of nut butter at the grocery store. A range of other nut butters have cropped up — almond, macadamia, cashew, and even seed butters made from pumpkin or sunflower seeds.

While this newfound variety available on the market is exciting, making your own nut butter at home is equally impressive. This way, you get to make it exactly how you'd like it. Salted or unsalted? Sweetened with honey or maple syrup or left unadulterated? Perhaps a blend of macadamia nuts and sunflower seeds might be your new favorite thing on toast. And the best part of it is, you can make nut butter for a fraction of the price of the commercially made product.

Simply process your nuts and seeds in a food processor or a high-speed blender until the paste comes to your preferred consistency and season with salt, spices, or sweetener, or leave it plain. For a better flavor, MasterClass recommends toasting the nuts and allowing them to cool before blending. However, due to the lack of added preservatives, do not expect homemade nut butters to have the same shelf life as their store-bought versions. Make smaller batches of nut butter to ensure they stay fresh, and remember the general ratio where 2 cups of nuts yield 1 cup of nut butter (per Cooking Light).

There are days when whipping up some frosting for a cake seems like a little too much work. Here, powdered sugar comes to the rescue. By mixing it with a flavorful liquid like milk or lemon juice, you can make an easy glaze to drizzle on your cake, or, even better, you can dust the cake with powdered sugar and call it a day. It also features in many other recipes, such as macarons and fondant.

Powdered sugar is simply regular sugar that has been ground finely, allowing it to dissolve in liquid more easily at room temperature. If it's something that you do not keep in your pantry, making it at home is easy enough. Just grind regular granulated sugar in a food processor or high-speed blender until it becomes a fine powder. Good Housekeeping warns not to continually process the sugar for more than a minute, as the machine produces heat that will melt the sugar. Sift out any large pieces, and combine the powdered sugar with a small amount of cornstarch.

According to Martha Stewart, powdered sugar with added starch is confectioner's sugar, although the two terms are used interchangeably. If you are particularly sensitive to the chalk-like texture and taste that cornstarch adds to the sugar, feel free to omit it. The starch is added to prevent the sugar from clumping over time and is not necessary if you are using the powdered sugar immediately or are sifting it before use.

Most traditional stocks call for roasted bones and mirepoix — a mix of carrots, celery, and onions — to contribute flavor to this base cooking liquid (per MasterClass). However, if you are less particular about keeping to tradition, you can make your own homemade stocks with leftover ingredients that would have ended up in the bin at the end of the day.

Leftover bones from a roast chicken, leek greens, carrot peelings, and broccoli stems can be thrown in a large pot, covered in cold water, and simmered for several hours to produce a flavorful, nutritious chicken stock that tastes better than most store-bought options. BBC Good Food notes that going the DIY route allows you complete control over what goes into your stock while costing effectively nothing.

Alternatively, you can also purchase bones or offcuts like feet and necks at the butcher for a cheap price in order to make larger batches of stock. For vegetable stock, save the trimmings of vegetables from your everyday cooking by storing and freezing them in resealable bags until you have a nice amount of vegetable scraps to make stock out of.

The people of America have spoken, and they have declared mayonnaise to be the number-one condiment in the country, with sales reaching $164 million in 2021 (via Statista). It's clear that people throughout the U.S. love mayonnaise, and they are willing to pay for it. So why make mayonnaise at home? Despite the flavor that store-bought mayonnaise brings to sandwiches, potato salad, and deviled eggs, homemade mayo is on another level.

To make mayonnaise, oil is very slowly whisked into egg yolks and lemon juice (or vinegar). This forms an emulsion of oil and water, where miniscule droplets of oil are evenly distributed in water and stabilized by a compound in the egg yolks called lecithin, creating a thick and creamy texture (per The New York Times). While this process can sometimes be tricky and result in broken emulsions where the oil separates out of the mixture, there are a few tricks to prevent that from happening.

To ensure a stable emulsion, add in a small amount of water to the yolks before whisking in your oil, and add the oil drop by drop in the beginning. Adding mustard provides flavor and also helps create the emulsion. As mayonnaise contains raw egg yolk, it is best to use pasteurized eggs and consume within a week.

While ketchup may have lost the title of America's number-one condiment to mayonnaise, the majority of Americans still enjoy ketchup. According to National Geographic, ketchup is found in 97% of American households. But while this tangy, vibrant condiment is a staple in the Western world, it has its origins in Southeast Asia, where it began as a fermented sauce made out of fish. In the 1700s, the British brought the idea of ketchup back home, and versions containing ingredients like walnuts, oysters, and mushrooms were common until 1876, when American Henry J. Heinz perfected the formulation for the company's iconic tomato ketchup (via History).

Making your own ketchup is not difficult. Bring canned or fresh tomatoes to a simmer with vinegar, brown sugar, and your choice of seasonings — usually fresh or powdered garlic and onions, and other spices like ground cloves, allspice and mustard. Cook the mixture until it has reduced and thickened, and then blend and strain it through a fine-mesh sieve. Serve with a heaping pile of fries, and store in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

When it comes to baking, brown sugar is often the secret weapon to add moistness and notes of toffee and caramel to your cookies and cakes. According to King Arthur Baking, brown sugar was originally made by leaving some of the naturally occurring molasses in the sugar during the refining process. However, these days, brown sugar sold at the grocery stores is made by adding molasses back to refined white sugar. The milder-flavored light brown sugar often used in cookies and banana bread contains about 3.5% molasses, while the more robust dark brown sugar found in gingerbread and spiced cakes has 6.5% (via Martha Stewart).

This means that brown sugar is actually incredibly easy to make at home. Keep a bottle of molasses in your pantry, and you will never need to buy brown sugar from the store. Simply add 1 tablespoon of molasses to every cup of white sugar for light brown sugar, and 2 tablespoons of molasses for dark brown sugar. King Arthur Baking even states that when making brown sugar at home for use in a recipe, there is no need to mix the molasses into the sugar — simply add both ingredients into your mixing bowl together.