The birds are singing, the evening light is beautiful, and my salad greens, herb, and cucumber seeds are sprouting in the growhouse. It's a lovely start to the weekend.
Today's Friday open thread prompt is courtesy of a suggestion from
lirazel: what are some types of food that
only taste good when handmade/made on a small scale (as opposed to the industrial scale supermarket version)?
My immediate response was 'what type of food
doesn't taste vastly better when made on a small scale by hand?' but then I thought a bit more, and realised there were quite a lot of foodstuffs where the difference is non-existent (homemade chips where you chop up a potato and roast it in the oven or deep fry it are no more delicious than the fast-food equivalent), or where the effort involved to make it by hand far exceeds any reward in better flavour (condiments in particular: I'm not going to make my own soy sauce, harissa, dijon mustard, etc, you know?).
However, I'd say that beyond the 'too much effort required' category, in my experience most other types of food are better if they're made on a smaller scale. The biggest one for me is baked goods. There is no bread, cake, pie, biscuit, or pastry on Earth in which the mass-produced supermarket (or otherwise industrial-scale) version tastes better than, or even remotely equally good as, the homemade or expensive artisinal bakery version. (I admit to some significant bias here. I worked part-time from the age of 15-23 — the first years of my working life — in artisinal bakeries/patisseries, the first thing I look up in every place I visit is the most highly recommended bakeries/patisseries, and I'm just in general a massive baked goods snob, which is somewhat hilarious in that I'm a very good cook, and comically, catastrophically bad at baking.)
What are your equivalent foodstuffs, if any?