Foods You Can Make Healthier from Scratch at Home

Eating healthy can sometimes be a hassle. It is expensive to buy food that is certified organic, and those costs just continue to increase. As an alternative to buying expensive healthy foods, here are some that you can make from scratch at home.

Bread

One thing that you can make from scratch is bread. While you will have to most likely purchase specific bread pans, bread is one of the cheaper foods to make from home and has been by people for centuries. Bread, at its simplest, contains flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and water. There are dozens if not hundreds of recipes for making homemade bread. Most all of them however will require the presence of yeast, or saccharomyces cerevisiae. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the oldest foods still used in the world, used in other foods like wine and other baked goods.

Yogurt

Homemade yogurt is an incredibly simple food to make, requiring just whole milk and a yogurt culture. Yogurt culture is a culture of bacteria that metabolizes the enzyme lactase, which is present in all milk products. This is why a lot of people who are lactose intolerant can eat yogurt with little to no problems. To make homemade yogurt, buy a yogurt culture, which can simply be a cup of your favorite plain yogurt brand, that you add to milk and let ferment overnight. There are many different variations that you can make, such as adding honey for a sweeter yogurt. Yogurt can also keep for up to a month in the fridge.

Granola

Granola is another good food that you can make healthier from scratch at home. There are dozens of variations of homemade granola, but each includes dry and wet ingredients. The dry ingredients include oats, almonds, coconuts, sunflower seeds, and anything else you might want to add. The wet ingredients form a syrup, which includes honey, butter or oil and vanilla that you warm up and then pour over the dry ingredients which are then spread into a pan and baked in the oven. Each recipe of homemade granola varies, but most agree that it is much simpler, less expensive, and very healthy compared to store bought granola.

While it does take a little extra effort to make food from scratch at home, it will pay off in the end because the food will be healthier and tastier than food from the store.

Here’s another article you might like: Vegetables That Are Healthier When Eaten Raw