While testing recipes for her newest cookbook, Ina Garten wanted to prove her most famous claim: Sometimes, store-bought really is fine!
“Truly delicious dishes don’t require hours of hands-on time in the kitchen,” Garten wrote in “Simply Ina,” which was released on Tuesday. “They just need a little thought and a few good ingredients.”
Garten has a whole list of store-bought ingredients that she trusts, and they feature prominently in the new cookbook. The “Barefoot Contessa” star said she even tested every brand of mashed potatoes — “from boxed flakes to refrigerated prepared potatoes” — to find the best brand. As they say, some heroes don’t wear capes.
You’ll find a recipe for skillet pasta with Rao’s marinara sauce in “Simply Ina,” and a potato-leek soup featuring Bob Evans refrigerated mashed potatoes (the winner of Garten’s thorough taste test).
But there was one store-bought ingredient that Garten couldn’t make work, no matter how hard she tried: prepackaged baking mixes.
A change in philosophy
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When Garten first began teaching herself how to cook with the help of Julia Child’s seminal cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” she thought that good food “had to be complicated” and that a fantastic meal required fancy techniques and long prep lists.
“After decades of cooking, I’ve learned something far more important: the best food is often the simplest,” she wrote in “Simply Ina.”
This lesson seems to be getting lost in cooking videos on social media, where the focus has become throwing in as many ingredients as possible to “create BIG flavor,” Garten said.
“It may seem more sophisticated, but for me, it’s just confusing,” Garten added. “Good food is a little like a gorgeous dress; if the fabric and the cut are beautiful, it doesn’t need a lot of sequins, ruffles, and bows.”
A simple way forward
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Store-bought ingredients play a big part in “Simply Ina,” but they’re rarely left alone. Garten noted that she uses them to cut down on prep and “jump-start a recipe,” like adding slowly cooked garlic and half-and-half to some store-bought mashed potatoes.
Garten admitted, though, that even she couldn’t find a way to make prepackaged baking mixes work. Sorry, Betty Crocker!
“Baking mixes always taste like baking mixes,” Garten said. “Their texture and flavor cannot be masked, even by adding good chocolate and pure vanilla extract.”
You’ll have to stick to making Garten’s delicious cakes from scratch. But as the holidays near, she still has plenty of tricks to save time in the kitchen — like making pecan pie with store-bought crust — so you can spend more time with your family instead.
