Making your own store-cupboard basics, like homemade cheese, flour and yoghurt, means you know exactly what’s going into your food. You can also make ingredients in bulk for a fraction of supermarket prices.
It doesn’t have to be a long, laborious process either. Here’s how you can create your own staples from scratch with the help of our favourite new gadget, the Thermomix® TM6, an advanced kitchen appliance that has over 20 different functions, including steaming, slow cooking, chopping, mixing and kneading.
Making flour
Remember the flour shortage of lockdown 2020? Well, once you know how to make your own, you’ll never have to worry about running out again. As well as being convenient, grinding your own flour means you can guarantee freshness and cater to specific dietary needs.
While it’s often made with wheat, almost any grain, nut or seed can be turned into flour, so you can experiment with chickpeas, chia seeds and quinoa as well as rice, oats and barley. All you need is a really good grinder, which is where the TM6 comes in – its powerful motor and high-quality knife will quickly turn your chosen grain into flour. Simply adjust the speed and duration depending on how fine you want it. There are plenty of basic flour recipes available on the TM6’s recipe platform, Cookidoo®, which you can access via its built-in touchscreen.
Fermenting yoghurt
The benefits of making your own yoghurt are that you can control the amount of sugar used in the recipe and finish it with any fruit you like. You just need milk and some starter yoghurt (look for plain yoghurts that have ‘live’ or ‘active cultures’ on the packaging – this refers to the ‘good bacteria’ that will convert your milk into yoghurt).
Then, you could go through the process of heating the milk to the correct temperature, combining it slowly with the ‘live’ yoghurt and leaving it to ferment for around eight hours yourself. Or you could use the TM6 to ensure a delicious finish every time. It handles all the prep and its fermentation mode uses controlled humidity and temperature to make the perfect yoghurt. We recommend this blueberry yoghurt recipe to start.
Mixing pastes and stocks
You may have been put off making your own curry pastes and stocks because of all the measuring, toasting and grinding involved. But with the TM6, all of the cooking admin is taken care of. You just need to assemble your spices and seasoning and the machine will toast and grind everything for you. It also has a built-in scale, so you can weigh ingredients straight into the mixing bowl. Whipping up a batch of Thai green curry paste suddenly feels a lot simpler.
Crafting cheese
Another great benefit of the TM6 is that it can help you make cheese at home, hassle-free. And who doesn’t want mozzarella on tap? Using the Cookidoo® recipes, you can also make your own halloumi, feta and ricotta cheese. And, as with your other store-cupboard basics, you can tweak the ingredients to suit different dietary requirements. Take this vegan mozzarella recipe – it’s made with cashew nuts, coconut oil and yoghurt, almond milk, nutritional yeast and tapioca starch blended together, mixed over heat and kneaded. And the best bit is that the TM6 does all the hard whisking for you.
The Thermomix® TM6 is available for £1,149 including the Simple Ideas Welcome Book, and six months’ free Cookidoo® membership, with access to over 60,000 recipes – book a demo or shop online
Alison is head of content for the Good Housekeeping Institute, responsible for product reviews across homes, beauty, wellness, family and food & drink. She lives by the William Morris quote that you should “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
Alison has over 15 years' experience as a lifestyle editor and has written features on everything from misophonia to how to dress like Claudia on The Traitors. She has also interviewed everyone from Dame Joanna Lumley to the Kardashians.
In her spare time, you'll find her hanging out with Monty the cocker spaniel and refreshing the Sezane website every five seconds.
