The Difference Between Restaurant Food And Homemade Food

This article will cover what the differences are between most homemade food and restaurant quality food. There are actually quite a bit of differences from both types. Both the homemade food and the restaurant food is prepared differently with a different set of priorities, for important personal reasons.

Homemade food is often prepared by most individuals with habits that they picked up from their generation as they get older. Usually it comes from their mother’s cooking habits, which eventually settle over time into their subconscious as the correct way to cook.

Restaurants on the other hand, do not accept such practices for most of their cooking, and follow a set of rules and procedures that are done for every unique dish made at the restaurant. Some of these reasons are controlled by rules and regulations set forth by the government, which involves food safety.

This means that restaurant food that follows good food safety, will have better food in the terms of preventing food borne illnesses and food poisoning. The risk of getting these are less at restaurants that actually follow good food safety when compared to homemade food.

Homemade recipes with eating cookie dough for example, are not acceptable to restaurants, because it it is not food safe. Therefore, this is rejected as an option for the guests that they serve.

By having to prepare their foods differently, many restaurants have developed recipes that most home cookers deem as ‘secret recipes’.

Sometimes restaurants do actually have a secret ingredient(s) that they are adding to their food that makes it better, but other times, they are just preparing the food differently than what someone would ever think to do for their homemade meals.

For example, a restaurant may follow the same exact ingredients for making mac n cheese, but may use a different method of preparing it by simply using more cheese in the recipe. When restaurants do these simple changes, it often leaves many individuals that taste their food in comparison to their home cooked food of the same type, baffled at why their food tastes better.

The normal tendency of most people cooking foods at home is to add more variety in the terms of ingredients to their food to make it taste better, while restaurant’s first instinct is to just add a little more (or a lot more) salt, butter, cheese, or sugar.

Restaurants operate more on survival instincts when preparing their foods, while the home cooker is more casual when preparing their foods. The reputation and future success of the restaurant is dependent on every single meal that they prepare for every individual customer that they serve foods and drinks to.

This drives restaurants to learn faster from their mistakes and come up with uniform plans, with unchanging good recipes that do not fail to satisfy majority of their guests.

Restaurants do make mistakes, but this is normally early on before the restaurant is well established with many facilities in different places. They learn from their mistakes early on, and continue to find the best ways to prepare their food without changing the quality of the flavor.

Many of their best foods and dishes are tried early on (sometimes locally first in the neighborhood before it ever makes it on the restaurant’s menu) as experiments, and are tested and tweaked repeatedly until they are perfect.

The individual preparing their foods at home doesn’t have the advantage of gaining the fast experience that a restaurant would, because they aren’t serving a large crowd of people various meals on a daily basis. Home cooked food is usually only prepared for a small or large family regularly (daily or weekly).

Even if the food is being prepared for a large family, restaurants still have the advantage, because their audience is larger. They also have the advantage of versatility, since they never know what their guests are interested in, or want from the foods they serve. Having more people to serve frequently, means that they learn faster.

Restaurants then begin their conquest of making the most flavorful foods possible for their guests, while homemade meals focus on preparing flavorful foods that fulfill the health needs and the typical hunger of the body. This is the main difference between restaurant food and homemade food.

Most people preparing homemade food hesitate to put a certain amount of one specific ingredient too much in their food when preparing it. Most restaurants do not hesitate to add more than the normal homemade food would have for that specific ingredient. The best restaurants in the terms of flavor have removed this barrier mentally, and just try and make the food taste as good as possible.

This means that restaurant food when compared to homemade food, will usually have more calories, more fats, more oil, more salt (sodium), more sugar, and more flavor. When these things are considered, it is easy to see why homemade food is so much more different than restaurant quality food.

Restaurants brainstorm every way possible to make their foods taste better. For example, a homemade sandwich may only use the basic slices of bread from their local grocery store to make their sandwiches on. Restaurants will go the extra mile and make or buy bread from a supplier that tastes so good that it can be eaten all by itself without the sandwich.

They also create or buy special sauces that are as flavorful as the meals that they go on. The average homemade foods will just use a simple store bought sauce, or a simple sauce/gravy recipe that they like that has been passed down in the family.

These simple homemade recipes are treasured by home cookers, which are not typically willing to discard them or change them. Restaurants on the other hand, will change and discard their own recipes as needed for the survival of the restaurant. This is why some of their items on the food menu never return to their menu again after they are taken off.

Restaurants work on a survival of the company basis, while homemade cookers work on a survival of their family basis. Homemade food is prepared with satisfying hunger in mind, with more flavor being a secondary option. Restaurants food is prepared first with flavor in mind, because they know that that is what keeps the guests coming back, so that they can keep their company afloat and pay the bills.