Cooking from scratch is on the rise as the questionable ingredients in convenience foods has come to light. Last week I shared some easy tips for beginners and decided to make this a short series. Come along as I share some free cooking from scratch resources, the exact way I learned how to cook from scratch.
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After last weeks post, Learning how to Cook from Scratch for Beginners, I decided to piggy back off the topic and provide some free cooking from scratch resources. These are the exact resources I used, and still use, when learning how to cook from scratch.
Why Learn how to Cook from Scratch
Learning how to cook from scratch can sound like a lot of work, especially when you have convenience items easily accessible. And I get it, grabbing a box of cake mix is much easier than grabbing the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, etc.
So why would you want to learn how to cook from scratch? Well, for one the taste! The difference in taste between store bought and home cooked is incredibly different.
Second, it’s healthier. Cooking from scratch is taking only the individual ingredients needed to make the meal versus the numerous additives, preservatives, and hard to pronounce ingredients. These questionable ingredients often cause issues related to digestion, behavior in children, and neurological. Cut these ingredients and many issues seem to disappear.
Third, cooking from scratch provides you with knowledge that you would otherwise not have. When you are using real ingredients, you learn how certain foods taste together and what can be used as substitutions.
In past years, cooking from scratch is also much more inexpensive that prepackaged or premade foods you can find in the store. This is still true to a point but inflation is wild these days so it base it off your location.
Free Cooking from Scratch Resources
When learning how to cook, there is no need to go out and spend a ton of money on cookbooks, e-books, guides, or courses – unless you want to of course! If you can, I encourage you to support small businesses that take the time to create these resources for you.
However, if you can’t or don’t want to pay for resources, there are tons of free resources you can look into right now! And while the below list may seem obvious, people don’t always think they can learn without following a course or guide.
Free Resources
- Youtube – you can follow along step by step on how to cook meals from scratch. I enjoy YouTube for learning because you can see how they are moving through the recipe, they usually explain in detail what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing it.
- Pinterest – this is a free resource with unlimited blog posts and videos in learning how to cook from scratch. Resources teaching how to mill your own flour, create your own dressings, baking bread, marinating meats, cooking whole chickens. The list is endless and there is a recipe for everything under the sun. As a blogger myself, I prefer Pinterest for free from scratch recipes. A little tip – print the recipes you enjoy and keep them for future use.
- Instagram – Instagram is full to the brim of free resources as individuals, myself included, share recipes, tips, tricks, hacks, and so much useful information in the kitchen.
- Local Library – I love going to the library for all the free resources. I don’t know about you but I enjoy having hard copies of resources but don’t love to spend money on them unless I already know I love it. So, the library is a great resource to get hard copies of cookbooks without spending the money. I know our library has a section with every kind of recipe book you could think of.
- Included Recipe Books – when learning how to can with my Presto pressure canner, I used all of the above resources as well as the recipe/instruction book that came with it.
Now, these free resources are the ones that I used when learning to cook from scratch. The internet is a wonderful tool and most of the information on it is free for you to use. It’s super easy to get sucked into thinking you need to pay for courses or classes, but you don’t, unless you want to, of course!
