Recipes bases. Should you buy them? What you should use instead.

I guess I’m lucky, in a sense, that my mother and grandmothers were very much cook from scratch home cooks which is a tradition I followed into adulthood. I can remember in my early teens (around the 1970s) recipe bases were quite the thing and my mother brought a couple. You could definitely taste a difference in the food and one that I personally didn’t like. Lucky none of the family liked them as well and my mother stopped buy them.

It’s easy enough to make a product you might purchase regularly and learn how to make it from scratch at home for a lot cheaper with basic pantry staples.

You don’t know what goes into recipe bases

Correct me if I’m wrong but I’d need a science degree to know what half of the ingredients are in the above recipe base.

Sugar, corn starch, vegetable powders (tomato, onion), maltodextrin, natural flavours (contain wheat), salt, potato starch, milk powders (cream, skim milk), paprika, burnt sugar, yeast extract, natural colour (carotene), sunflower oil, garlic extract. Contains naturally occurring glutamates. Any Allergies? Contains wheat and milk. May contain soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts, egg, sesame, fish, crustacea and lupin.

Compared to if you make it from scratch yourself:

500 g beef stir-fry strips, 1 tbsp olive oil, 30 g butter, 1 small onion, chopped, 250 g button mushrooms, thinly sliced, ½ cup salt-reduced beef stock, 2 tbsp tomato paste, 250 ml carton of light sour cream (I would substitute with Greek yoghurt), 1 tsp cornflour, pasta to serve (optional).

I know which one I’d prefer. And what difference does it make to the speed or convenience of making the meal? Opening a packet to add the seasoning when you still have to slice the beef, chop the onions and mushrooms and add the other ingredients anyway. The recipe base is really unnecessary.

There are other ways to create convenience

I’m the first one to say that I love convenience grocery items. Not every fortnight but most fortnights I’ll buy grated cheese, packaged ham or canned pulses instead of buying them dried.

But I won’t ever sacrifice flavour over convenience and I don’t know whether it’s from a lifetime of having made from scratch food, that I just dislike flavoured meal bases let alone all of the ingredients in them that you wouldn’t have a clue what they were.

Looking at my local supermarket this week, they have Maggi Dry meal bases on sale for 2 for $3. If I was to buy 14 for my fortnight’s worth of meals, I would pay $21 on meal bases alone. I’ll choose those that my family might eat:

• Devilled Sausages (2)
• Beef Stroganoff
• Lamb Casserole (would make it with chicken)
• Satay Chicken
• Beef Goulash
• Cottage Pie (2)
• Apricot Chicken
• Chicken Chasseur (2)
• Chow Mein (2)
• Butter Chicken

What pantry staples to keep instead of buying recipe bases

With my current pantry staples, I could make all of those meals with my usual top up of meat and vegetables saving me $21 and knowing exactly what goes into my meals.

If you lack inspiration and need these meal bases, use them for inspiration but rather keep a good supply of the following to create the same, over and over again, for a lot cheaper:

• Plain flour and/or corn flour
• Stock powder (chicken, beef or vegetable – I use the Massels brand)
• Salt and pepper
• Tomato paste
• Soy sauce
• Crushed garlic and/or ginger (or ground ginger)
• BBQ and tomato sauce
• Greek yoghurt (to substitute sour cream)
• Peanut butter (for satay)
• Apricot jam (for Apricot Chicken)
• Spices: paprika, turmeric, curry powder
• Brown sugar
• Vinegar
• Tinned tomatoes

As you can see, most of us have these ingredients in our pantry already and those meals I chose could be recreated with these simple staples. That $21 I spent on recipe bases could be spent on more meat, a top up for my second week’s shopping or saved and put towards something else.

Do you buy recipe bases?

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