Shortcut Ingredients You Should And Shouldn't Use

There's a reason why the expression goes: "the best thing since sliced bread." It seems we're constantly looking for ways to make cooking easier, with shortcuts ranging from condensed soup to frozen veggies and more. While some of these items can be your best friend in the kitchen, not all of these shortcuts are worth your money. Want to separate the wheat from the chaff? We've got you covered.

But before we begin, a quick but essential note: many convenience foods (including the pre-peeled oranges that made the rounds a few years back) play an important role in accessibility: these foods make it easier for people with disabilities or other barriers to cook, and we applaud that. 

In this list, we explore the benefits and drawbacks — financial, environmental, and otherwise — of some common convenience foods. But we make no judgment calls on what you do with that information. On the contrary, we fully support those who seek out the shortcuts they need to make cooking a pleasurable and achievable experience.

Pre-grated cheese is one example of a convenience food that's not just more expensive than doing it yourself — it actually leads you to pay more for lowered quality. Due to the moisture and fat in cheese, when it's grated, it tends to stick together. While this is totally natural, manufacturers assume that when you reach for the pre-shredded cheese in the fridge, you want it to sprinkle, not clump. So they add anti-caking agents to it, including plant-based cellulose. 

While there's nothing innately bad about cellulose (and Snopes debunked 2016 rumors that it was actually wood pulp), it's still not really something you want in your cheese ... especially not if you want it to melt easily. After all, additives keeping the cheese from congealing when cold may also prevent it from amalgamating when warm, such as when you want it to melt into a luscious carbonara sauce, as Cucina by Elena explains. Moral of the story? Get familiar with your box grater: it'll save you money and make for a better final result.

Mincing garlic can leave your hands stinky and your cutting board messy, so we totally get why you might be tempted to opt for that stuff in a jar. But please, please resist the urge. Not only are the incredible health benefits of garlic far more easily reaped by the body when delivered in fresh form, according to the experts at Northwestern University, but jarred garlic far more subdued, muted, and even staler in flavor than the fresh stuff.

This is because garlic's flavor is extremely mutable, becoming more bitter the longer it sits around with its cell walls broken (i.e., pre-minced). And since jars of minced garlic also contain stabilizers and preservatives like citric and phosphoric acid, the pre-minced stuff just doesn't quite taste like itself. So eschew the jarred stuff and opt instead to pestle, grate, or mince your garlic yourself. It takes a bit more time and effort, but your garlic bread will thank you.

Despite the expression "easy as pie," making pie crust is no simple feat to get just right. We can understand why a lot of people opt for the pre-made stuff, and with so many brands to choose from, surely one must be worth it? Not according to the experts.

For Macheesmo, the most advantageous shortcut is also the most expensive and the least desirable: Frozen pie crust saves you loads of time but costs nearly double the price of homemade or refrigerated prepared crust. And the taste just ... isn't there

Testers at The Kitchn, meanwhile, found that despite the slight time advantage and comparable price of store-bought, the flavor and texture of homemade are unmatched. With practice, an experienced pie-maker can turn out a crust in just 20 minutes of active time. And while there are now crusts made without hydrogenated fats, nothing beats the simplicity of flour, salt, sugar, and your choice of butter or lard, depending on the context.

Verdict? Arm yourself with a food processor and start practicing: there's no time like the present to perfect your homemade pie crust recipe.

Store-bought rotisserie chicken is a game-changer when you need to get supper on the table quickly — and depending on where you get it from, it's a total steal. Costco is famous for its $4.99 pre-cooked rotisserie chicken that's so cheap the chain actually loses money on it. And you can make this chicken even more worth it if you arm yourself with a smart menu plan.

The first day you buy your rotisserie chicken, serve it as-is with your favorite sides like mashed potatoes or mac and cheese. When dinner is over, take the time to shred any remaining meat and store it in a container in the fridge. The next day it can be used for a casserole, enchiladas, or chicken salad. Finally, put all of the remaining chicken bones into a pot and cover with water. Add a halved onion as well as a carrot and a stalk of celery — both cut into three-inch lengths — and simmer low and slow for a few hours to make a rich stock, perfect for homemade soup or any other stock needs.

Ligurian pesto is a summery sauce made with fresh basil, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil, traditionally pounded by hand in a mortar and pestle. Considering the freshness of the sauce, we bet you're surprised we're recommending store-bought, but hear us out. From the pine nuts to the parmesan to the fresh herbs, pesto can be costly to make at home — one BBC recipe tester found it was three times as expensive, to be exact. And a jar of pesto isn't just great stirred into your dinnertime pasta! It adds a delicious zip to omelets, sandwiches, or hummus in seconds. Perhaps best of all: there are so many brands to choose from. Merch Dope offers six phenomenal choices, including a few with no additives or preservatives.

If you're serving a simple pesto pasta for a dinner party, go for homemade. (You can even riff on the classic, changing up the nuts or herbs to suit your whims.) But as a regular weeknight ingredient, store-bought pesto is a must-have hack for sure. Of course, if you do need a killer pesto recipe, we can hook you up.

There's no denying that canned beans are easier than dried, but we always bought them a little bit guiltily, assuming that it was far more eco-friendly to buy dried and cook them at home. Turns out, we were wrong! 

While if you compare a bag of dried beans to a can of cooked beans on the shelf, the dried beans will indeed have a lower carbon footprint, that all changes once you take them home. The energy expended to soak and cook the beans yourself is far less efficient than the industrial measures used to batch-cook beans that are then siphoned into cans. In fact, one study showed that cooking beans from dried on the stovetop consumes 11 times more energy than reheating beans from a tin. (Plus, it's way easier.)

Moral of the story? Go for the canned beans guilt-free. They're ready to heat and eat in minutes and they're better for the planet! And you can reduce your meal's sodium by rinsing your canned beans before using them. 

While pasta cooks up in under 10 minutes, rice can easily take 20 or more — and close to an hour for some brown varieties. It's no wonder that instant or minute rice is so popular, and it turns out, it's also a worthwhile shortcut in many cases.

Minute rice is essentially the same as regular rice, except that it's been par-cooked slightly before being packaged for sale. Not only does the Whole Grain Council count minute rice as a serving of whole grains — same as the rice you have to cook yourself — but Monica Auslander Moreno, MS, RD, LD/N, nutrition consultant for RSP Nutrition tells Eat This, Not That that the nutritional difference between instant rice and regular rice is "inappreciable." Choose a brand with no additives if possible, and this becomes an excellent staple shortcut to keep on-hand.

(Especially because the alternative — precooking rice for meal prep — can prove dangerous if not done correctly. We'll take our rice sans bacterial overgrowth, thanks very much.)

As with making any bread dough from scratch, making pizza dough requires time — time that we don't all have. And as Bon Appétit found in a blind taste test, store-bought can be as good as homemade ... as long as you know what to look for. 

In its test, the outlet pitted a $4.69 Boboli crust against homemade pizza dough and frozen pizza dough from Whole Foods. The homemade dough (clocking in at less than $.50 per crust) and dough from Whole Foods (about $.90 per crust) were both comparable in terms of flavor, but the Boboli crust got thumbs down across the board ... and it was by far the most expensive of the bunch. 

Whole Foods isn't the only place making a good pizza dough! PiaciPizza offers some other great brands that make pizza night a quick and easy affair indeed. And if you live near a good pizzeria, many will sell extra dough balls if you just ask!