I keep mayo until it seems off. I don’t have a set time, just trust my senses. I am guessing about two weeks but it rarely lasts that long.
Things like hot sauce and mustard are practically indestructible but do lose some potency with time. I don’t recall ever throwing anything out for having gone bad.
Tortillas (flour) if left as uncooked dough only lasts a few days but extras can be rolled out and cooked and stored in the freezer where they last longer. No clue how long as none have gone past a month.
Different recipes for the same thing may hold up differently depending on ingredients or proportions. Recipes with more acid or salt will last longer than those with less. Regardless of how long something should last, if it smells or tastes off, throw it out.
Broth is easy and tastes better. Whenever I buy a rotisserie chicken, I’ll make broth from the carcass, then freeze it for later. I also freeze mushroom stems and onion pieces; when I have enough, I will add a carrot and make mushroom broth.
I also make my own red sauce, but these days I use 28 oz canned or crushed tomatoes. It’s too much work to grow and blanch my own.
1 pound chiles. Stemmed, seeded and rough chop
1 medium onion (about 5-6 oz) peeled and rough chop
1 large carrot sliced thin
4 cloves of garlic, quartered
Put into a jar and top up with 3% brine. Leave for at least 10 days, longer is fine. Depending on set up, may need to burp jars daily to let gas escape. Drain while saving the brine. Put all chunks with 1.5 cups of reserved brine into a blender and blend for 5 minutes. If too thick, add more brine and blend more.
Add vinegar if desired. Put into jabs and refrigerate.
Sauce may still ferment more in the refrigerator so check it regularly to relieve pressure if needed. Sauce will be taste hotter when first made but mellows over a few days to a final heat level.
For chiles, I like a blend where half are something hot but not insanely so (habanero last year). The other half are lower scoville pepper to reduce the overall heat and add complexity (jalapeño, poblano, and aji crystal last year). The addition of carrots, onions, and garlic also add flavor and lower heat. I am trying to get flavor with a little kick, not make a sauce that is all heat and no flavor that can only be used a drop at a time.
Butter - Whenever I make it, first batch is sweet butter from raw cream, and save the buttermilk to make (really good) cultured butter the next few batches. I don’t use enough butter to keep it in constant rotation.
Ricotta - If I’m making something with ricotta (not often, usually holidays), I’ll get something like Strauss Family Creamery milk and make it at home. Super easy and better than anything I find at the store.
I make my own tapatio/cholula style hot sauce with smoked, dried, red serrano chiles.
I make lots of fermented drinks and foods. Tons of kimchi and kombucha over the years.
Buying premade pasta sauce or salad dressing is pretty much unheard of in my family.
My mayo never tastes as good as Best Foods or Kewpi, so I almost never make it.
I’d love to have a go at mustard and fish sauce.
Much of the time the “purchase instead” driver is a random, expensive-ish kitchen tool I’ll almost never use, or time I don’t have or want to spend that would turn it into a “the fastest and cheapest homemade butter is a trip to the store” project.
The things we make ourselves are mostly things that we use regularly, or need to make use of an adubdance of something. Also things where we don’t have access to a really good version. Or where the effort yields noticeably superior results. We probably make fewer things from scratch than people would guess about us, given how much effort here goes into cooking and sourcing ingredients.
A few things I never buy from a store are salad dressing, stock/broth, shio koji, teriyaki sauce, pasta sauce, and rendered fats.
We have access to really great raw milk, so you’d think we’d make various cheeses, yogurt, buttter, but we don’t. We tried making mozzarella during the pandemic, and got a good version, but never as good as the freshly made stuff from the place in South Philly. Same with ricotta, which we can get from several local farms.
Plenty of things we’ve done from scratch and said the effort isn’t worth it, like nut butters and sausage. Jonathan roasts red peppers when he needs them, but I am lazy and buy a jar on the very few occasions I need those. I’ve done it many times, and have decided it’s not worth it unless I’ve got really excellent peppers, in which case I might. We eat a ton of kimchi, so sometimes we buy a big tub if we are out of the homemade.
I am smiling a bit remembering an exchange about making shio koji. A bunch of people in that thread really, really wanted to buy the ready-made stuff, which I couldn’t understand because it takes absolutely no effort at all beyond an occasional stir and then lasts forever. That exchange and this thread make it pretty clear each person has their own “why would you ever buy that?!?!” items.
On the one occasion I made hummus, it turned out superbly. Simple for sure, but no small amount of effort to remove all the skins by hand. I will do it again, but only when a lazy day demands it.
Also, if you produce your own vegetables/fruit/meats/dairy then you’re much more likely to make things from scratch from these. I roast my own peppers or make my own hot sauce when I grow the appropriate varieties. I’ve dealt with an entire wild boar which included making sausages. A friend of mine kept a few dairy goats and made her own (delicious) cheeses. Other friends fish regularly and make smoked fish and pates.
Again, most of us aren’t homesteaders, so I think it boils down to (a) the luxury of having leisure time, and (b) deciding how to spend that.