Homemade is not always best made. I know; that’s a weird thing for a homesteader to say, but I’m as serious as a crutch. I make a lot of household staples in my kitchen or at my dining room table, but “a lot” doesn’t mean “all.”

Disclaimer: the lists below are not exhaustive by any stretch. This post comes from my own research and opinions, so I will add more examples as I find them.

Should you make [blank] at home?

Not necessarily. Usually, yes. Sometimes, no. Let me explain….

Impossible to Make at Home

I’ll be the first to say there are things you flat out can’t make at home. Panko? Not possible. Panko bread crumbs are literally made by flaking bread that was electrocuted. Yes, you read that right. Electrocuted. Not baked in an oven. Hooked up to wires so that billions of electrons could very quickly zap it into loaves. Recreating that at home would be just about impossible, and I can’t recommend hooking your car battery up to a loaf pan and calling it science.

• Panko (just make bread crumbs)
• Commercial Yeast (you can keep a yeast culture alive for generations, but maintaining an unchanging strain of yeast requires a full laboratory)
• Currency (I mostly added this as a joke, but if you’re considering printing money at home, don’t…)
• Sodium Benzoate (a common preservative found in lots of store-bought pantry foods; requires a lab)
• Commercial MSG (you can make a natural substitute, but you can’t replicate store-bought MSG)
• Cream of Tartar (it’s a byproduct of commercial wine-making, not homebrew)

Unreasonable to Make at Home

Also, there are things that you can make at home, but…why bother? Example: bleach. It is made from table salt and water and, like Panko, electricity. Hot water and electricity are added to table salt to break it down into it’s components, then those components are put back together a particular way to make bleach (source). Note that this is a very watered down explanation of how bleach is made. Please don’t put salt water and a toaster in your washing machine and expect it to whiten your clothes.

• Bleach (see above)
• Sugar (so much work, so little reward)
• Baking Soda (way cheaper to just buy it)
• Corn Meal from Homegrown Corn (requires a lot of infrastructure or a lot of time)
• Flour from Homegrown Grains (also requires a lot of infrastructure or a lot of time)

As a disclosure: we plan to mill our own grains out of our own garden at some point in the future, but we don’t have the time or desire to do it fully by hand. The infrastructure required has so far been cost prohibitive.

Aggravating to Make at Home

Then, there are the things, usually foodstuffs, that have a thousand recipes online to try, but none of them ever quite match the store-bought product you’re trying to replicate. We have this issue with black olives and dish soap. Black olives are supposed to taste and feel a certain way that I can’t seem to replicate. And I’m all for a good homemade body soap, don’t get me wrong. There is always a artisan bar of coffee soap on Will’s sink, but when it comes to getting the dishes washed, nope. I know Dawn has it’s flaws, but the homemade versions just don’t work as well.

• Whatever you try to make that no one will eat
• Whatever you try to make that no one will use
• Whatever you try to make that no one will trust

Uninformed to Make at Home

Finally, there are things for which you can easily find recipes online, but the promised product is…misleading at best and an outright lie at worst. Sunscreen is the top-tier example here. Most of the ingredients in homemade sunscreen recipes barely give any protection from the sun. If you get your hands on zinc oxide, it’s possible to make something akin to sunscreen at home, but you can only get a general idea of how much SPF it should have. Not how much it actually has due to the completely different environment and methodology used in a home kitchen. Whereas commercial sunscreens are thoroughly tested for safety and efficacy (source, source, source, source). Don’t make sunscreen at home. I will die on this hill.

• SUNSCREEN (I legitimately can’t emphasize this enough.)
• Anything with lead in the Ingredient List (lead is highly toxic)
• Anything with bleach AND another cleaner in the Ingredient List (most mixtures are unsafe and can be lethal. Unless you have a background in chemistry, it’s best to avoid potential mistakes)

What You Can Make at Home

We keep an up-to-date list of Homemade Things We Actually Make. At the end of the day, what matters is usually whether you want to try a homemade version of the product in question. Most, though not all, of the Impossible items have practical substitutions. And remember: if you don’t like it homemade, store-bought is still an option, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. (Except sunscreen. Always go for store-bought sunscreen.)