
Many of us have found ourselves in the same situation, you come home from a long day of school or work and are overcome with the sensation of wanting something sweet, not the sweetness of an apple or banana but the overwhelming sweetness of the sugar in a slice of cake or a cookie. To solve this problem a lot of us would probably rummage out some week old Chips Ahoy cookies from the pantry if available, or maybe some other store-bought baked good. It’s much simpler than whipping out a spatula and a whisk and spending an hour creating high-quality sweets from scratch only to be rewarded with only a short moment of satisfaction.
But given the time, resources, and patience to bake these sweet treats from home, would you? It has become a common fact in the world of baking that home-baked is always better than store-bought, no matter the circumstances. But is this really true? Even if it tastes better, many people would argue that baking is a waste of time when they could just make a quick grocery run to Target and get some frosted sugar cookies to enjoy.
To test the actual effect of home baking, I baked a brownie, a staple when it comes to dessert, using this brownie recipe. I then compared it to a brownie called the 2 bite brownie, which I found at Busch’s. You can learn more about this brownie here.
Making the homemade brownie took about 15 minutes to prepare the batter and roughly 40 minutes to bake. This is a long time to wait for a casual (very unhealthy) snack, but in this case, I didn’t mind waiting for a little while.
After the brownies came out of the oven, I thought eating them warm would give home-baked an advantage over store-bought, even though it was extremely hard to wait given how good they smelled.
Once they had finally cooled I tried the store-bought brownie first: The first, and only thing you taste is sweetness. It honestly tasted like the frosting on a chocolate glazed doughnut (this is not necessarily a bad thing if you like frosting but I thought it was too sweet). It also had an extremely weird texture, for one it was stodgy and wet, plus it had a strange clay-like texture that felt wet while also having no crust that left your mouth with a dry sensation. Given all of this, it was also a brownie, a very, very, mediocre brownie, it tasted fine but not something you would eat more of so I will give this an overall rating of 6/10.
Next, we will try the home-baked brownie. Once I bit into this one I immediately noticed a few things were different, first and foremost it had a much better flavor, instead of just sweetness you could taste multiple other things such as a faint trace of bitterness coming from the chocolate and a bit of coffee that complemented the chocolate well. The second thing I noticed was the texture. Instead of a mushy blob of chocolate, there were layers of texture starting with a crispy outside that led into a chewy center. This was a much better brownie than the store-bought brownie landing at a respectable 8.5/10.
So home-baked clearly wins the flavor battle but due to the time and effort it takes to bake I think that it evens both of them out to a 7/10. But there is one more key factor when deciding on your desserts: health. According to The Guardian, “To buy cakes, breads, and pastries in supermarkets and convenience stores is to step out of the comforting domestic kitchen and into the food industry’s science lab.”
They say that scientists hired by the food industry spend years of their lives taking the raw ingredients you would use when home-baking and processing them into something more profitable and tastier. Some of the ways they do this are by adding emulsifiers, soya flour, vinegar, and enzyme-based crumb softeners derived from animals, fungi, cereals, and bacteria. Even more outrageous, many of these products will not show up on the ingredients listed because they are considered to be “processing aids.” When home-baking you can mostly contain a number of ultra-processed processed foods and chemicals that you incorporate into your baking, this makes home-baked much healthier than store-bought.
I hope this article has convinced you to take an hour on the weekends to bake at home instead of buying from the store. Good luck, and enjoy!