I'd love go make chana masala, my favorite indian dish. but it just takes too long to make...
Croissants - 3 days prep time minimum? You have to be very precise with everything and it's just such a bother.
I once made borscht. That is a labour of love I'll never go through again. I also made a hot chocolate layer cake, including making the marshmallows, and that was a lot of work.
Cake. Orange cake.
I like to do a bunch of baking for the holidays, and usually do a mix of easy/familiar recipes, plus some new/challenging recipes. I made caramels, and while I was pretty happy with them, I never heard one person comment on them, and they were a lot of effort compared to things like chocolate chip cookies, so I've never made them again.
Edit: Another is pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkins. I've done it, it's not that difficult, but it's also not any cheaper or better tasting than just buying good canned pumpkin.
Most of them. They require not only the right ingredients and even the right brands. But the amount of tools you would have to go out and get, just to make that thing. I currently am struggling to make homemade butterbeer, from harry potter, because I spent like a combined $30+ in materials and ingredients and that's only by one recipe. Which is another thing, recipes vary and have their own way of doing things which again is going to require having to spend more just to make it.
It's a no-brainer why people would rather have take out or go out to restaurants.
Cooking in general
Soup dumplings. The broth for the soup has to be make in a specific way to solidify and I think there's also a complex method of incorporating the soup into the meat and veggies in the dumplings. It's just a very time consuming process all around. It's sucks tho because I love soup dumplings and being able to make a huge portion of them would be amazing.
Ramen. Like true, 14+ hrs of effort tonkotsu broth.
It's been a dream of mine for a long time, but fuck is that a long time.
As much as I love barbecue I don't and won't own a smoker.
I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I'm pretty motivated to make food homemade.
Baklava is the one I'd like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.
Billionaire
Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I'd ordered just for the task:
The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn't want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.
Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.
There's also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it's also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.
Khao soi
Papa reyeñas(sp?). They're so good, it's basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping
Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes...I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There's also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes
I don't enjoy cooking, but I'm pretty good at it when I want to be... But I have to want to be
Doughnuts. I made doughnuts by hand recently, and kneading the dough. For. 30. Minutes. By. Hand. Fuck, never again. I usually don't mind kneading dough by hand, but this was the first time I wish I had a mashine for it
All food is like that to me. I only cook because otherwise I'd die of starvation. I eat to live - food has always just been fuel for me. I don't want to put any more effort into cooking than what is absolutely necessary. If money was not an issue, then personal chef would be the first person I'd hire. Hell, if it was possible I'd hire someone to eat it for me too.
Proper paella. I enjoy making it in the sense that it's simpler to cook and is more like a risotto, but to make an actual paella as close to the way the dish should be made takes so much effort, the correct ingredients and equipment I have neither the time nor the money for.
Demiglace. Way too much work.
I don't really lack for motivation, I'll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can't logistically make happen.
For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I've checked,) and I just don't have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.
I've made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I've helped butcher chickens, I've made beef Wellington, sushi, I've baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I've made ice cream, homemade pierogies.
I live in a different city and often find myself wishing for my mother's Portuguese Salted Cod Casserole. It was out typical sunday family dinner when I still lived in the same city as them. Not a cultural tradition, just because it was my favourite dish.
But the nature of it ensures that I'll never ever ever have the patience to do it myself, considering that step one is soaking the dried salted cod in cold water that you repeatedly replace for up to 48 hours in order to get the salt out.
I have the Ladurée macaron cookbook and I look at it frequently, and then go buy a lesser version of the cookie and pretend I’m happy.
Spring rolls. They are so much work. If you wanna do them right you have to start the night before. So many ingredients, the sauce. But they're soooo good.
https://www.kitchentreaty.com/40-cloves-of-garlic-soup/
I made it once for Thanksgiving years ago. Everyone loved it. It was a pain. Especially since I didn't have an immersion blender.
Pavlova.
Working in the kitchen requires good coordination and an intuition I will never have in my current setting because it's not the form of intuition I was raised on. The ability to cook to precision without everything spelled out comes off to me as almost psychic, and I don't have that. So I will never be making myself my favorite dish.
The only reason i do any cooking at all is because it's too expensive to buy food.
I hate cooking. It takes so much effort.Ramen, but it takes so God damn long to make.
Cubanos. I want to really, really bad. But I know I will never go through that.
