Make It, Don't Buy It: Recipes So Good You'll Never Eat Out Again

By Matt Remoroza

Make better food, spend less, and rediscover the joy of cooking

Have you ever been shocked by the price of a fancy blended drink or wondered if you could make a better, less expensive version of your favorite takeout salad at home? Often, the answer is yes, you can—and Matt Remoroza will show you how.

Make It Don’t Buy It invites you to stop ordering takeout and try your hand at making your favorite store-bought foods from scratch, with over 100 recipes for dishes that taste better and often cost less than their overpriced restaurant counterparts. This unique cookbook draws on a variety of cuisines to satisfy every craving. Enjoy comforting breakfasts (Biscuits and Sausage Gravy), riffs on chicken and rice (Teriyaki Chicken, Halal Cart Chicken), and slow-cooked comfort food (Dipped Italian Beef, Easy Carnitas), as well as satisfying beverages (Iced Mango Matcha Latte) and impressive desserts (Basque Cheesecake). Matt breaks down the ingredients, tools, and techniques you’ll need to discover for yourself how simple it can be to make restaurant-worthy meals at home. 

You’ll be inspired to cook more, eat out less, and make meals in your kitchen that are tastier than anything you'll find on a delivery app or in the frozen aisle in a grocery store.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DK
• Release date: Sep 30, 2025
• ISBN: 9780593964460

Matt Remoroza

Matt Remoroza is the creator of the @morocooks channels on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Originally inspired by other YouTube channels like Binging with Babish and Chef John, Matt taught himself to cook and began making videos, following themes like "Make It Or Buy It?," "Packing Lunch For My Girlfriend," and "Get More From Your Food" that resonated with his rapidly growing fanbase. Known for his simple, straighforward recipes and affable personality, Matt keeps the cooking simple, the mood light, and the attitude just a little irreverent.

Book preview

g Contents

A Moldy Piece of Bread Started It All …

I was never a fantastic home cook. I could whip together some decent dishes, but I got lots of mileage out of premade foods and ingredients. My signature dish was instant ramen garnished with a homemade boiled egg.

One fateful day, on a routine grocery run, I had a vision. My fridge held a tub of shredded Costco rotisserie chicken, an array of veggies, and some leftover sauces from takeout the previous night. If I just bought some pita, I thought, I could have the most scrumptious wrap for dinner. However, reality was disappointing. The bread was dry and lacked the structure to hold my ingredients. I tried to save it by double bagging, but when I reached for another pita, I was met with a gray, fuzzy patch of mold.

It was right then and there that I decided to try making pita from scratch. Homemade bread was out of my expertise, so my first iteration was not winning any best pita awards—yet it was still miles better than my grocery store pita experience. It became my first Make It or Buy It video, and you can still find that recipe online.

Making food instead of buying it is no new concept. In fact, there’s a plethora of online blogs, books, and videos touting the greatness of from-scratch cooking. The way this book differs lies mainly in the experience of the author, or lack thereof. I feel like most from-scratch recipes are made by skilled cooks with a decent amount of time on their hands. The recipes you’ll find within each chapter of this book were chosen, made, and tested by someone with no formal training or jobs in food, and who has little patience for fussy things.

Let me tell you what you’re getting into . . .

Chapter 1

Before You Begin

In this chapter, I’ll share some of the basics you’ll need to know to make any recipe in this book.

Chapter 2

Foundations

This chapter is all about recipes needed to make a bunch of other recipes. These are often direct replacements for grocery store items. You’ll find things like a basic Marinara Sauce that can be incorporated into other recipes in the book, as well as used in the day-to-day.

Chapter 3

Snacks and Appetizers

Also known as the dishes that are designed to be ordered for the table. Sometimes the number of table attendees isn’t large enough to justify getting that tempting appetizer. Every time I have been in that situation, I made a mental note of the thing I wanted to eat and put it in this chapter.

Chapter 4

Breakfast

Did you know that brunch is the meal with the highest profit margins? This is because breakfast foods are generally easier to make and use less expensive ingredients. In this chapter, you’ll find classic breakfast foods, as well as some express recipes to use if you need a speedy and nutritious bite to get the day started.

Chapter 5

Soups

There are soups that take tons of preparation and technique (looking at you, pho), and then there are all the other soups. In this chapter, you’ll find the other soups. These are soups that are really easy to make yet are often found on restaurant menus and in aluminum cans.

Chapter 6

Chicken and (Mostly) Rice

Every cuisine has a chicken and rice dish. If I had to guess the reasoning, it would be because chicken and rice is easy to prepare, relatively inexpensive, and very delicious. The same combination of traits that made chicken and rice very popular also makes it well-suited for home cooking. There’s also a chicken parm recipe in here. I’m not sure where else I was supposed to put it.

Chapter 7

Low and Slow

Here you’ll find various braised and baked dishes. While they take a while to cook, it’s mostly time that you can leave the pot alone and do other things. Inexpensive, tough cuts of meat are ideal for this type of cooking, and the result tends to make a lot of food. These recipes are great for meal preps or large dinner parties.

Chapter 8

Seafood

Many home cooks find seafood pretty intimidating. I am no exception. I tested many common restaurant seafood dishes, and the ones that were surprisingly painless made it in this chapter.

Chapter 9

Bread

The bakers at your local bakery work very early and long hours to make many types of delicious breads. You will not find those breads in this chapter. Instead, you’ll find staple breads you may find at the grocery store that are surprisingly simple to make from scratch.

Chapter 10

Potatoes

We live in a time where potatoes are plentiful and cheap, yet can be elevated to great heights. Here you’ll find the recipes for restaurant-quality potato dishes that can be made for pennies on the dollar.

Chapter 11

Pasta and Noodles

Noodles are one of the most popular foods in the world. Grocery stores have entire aisles dedicated to pastas and sauces, and another aisle dedicated to instant noodles. Here you’ll find popular pasta and noodle dishes that are often bought premade.

Chapter 12

Desserts

Who doesn’t love a sweet treat? Some desserts are intricate creations requiring pastry chef expertise. The ones you’ll find in this book feel really impressive, but do not require a culinary degree in sweets.

Chapter 13

Beverages

The smaller ingredient costs and simpler procedures gives beverages a lower barrier to entry compared to food. Here you’ll find some commonly served drinks with barriers so low that you can easily make them at home.

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Chapter 1

Before You Begin

Chapter 1. Before You Begin | Contents

The Make or Buy Philosophy

Some Good-to-Know Cooking Concepts

Essential Kitchen Tools

Stocking the Pantry

Shameless Shortcuts and Substitutions

Marvelous Menus

g Chapter 1. Before You Begin g Contents

The Make or Buy Philosophy

The landscape of food has changed a lot over the years. The constantly expanding collection of ready-to-eat foods at the grocery store, and the ability to summon restaurant dishes on demand through delivery apps, have made eating more convenient than ever. So much so that it’s easy to wonder why we even need to cook in the first place.

A quick audit of what modern society provides us tells us we don’t actually need to cook. One can live a long and healthy life off of microwaved veggies and five-dollar rotisserie chickens, but is that truly living? An important part of living life is enjoying it, and there are so many aspects to cooking that can enhance our lives. By taking the shortcuts, we end up missing out on the experiences provided by the scenic route.

The obvious benefit to home cooking is creating healthier and tastier food; preparing ingredients by hand gives us a heightened awareness of what goes in our meals, and by extension, our bodies. As for the taste, that may depend on the expertise of the person cooking. However, keep in mind that I’m no haughty pro chef, and the words I could make this way better, don’t leave my mouth any time I eat food not made by me. The recipes in this book were written by an average college student who watched a few cooking videos and got really sidetracked—so I’m confident that anybody, even the most novice home cooks, can create something really delicious.

One of the most overplayed phrases we hear in life is time is money. (If I had a nickel for every time I heard that phrase, I would have substantial passive income … or metaphorical immortality.) Well, you know what else is money? Money. Some foods are just so much cheaper to make at home that they’re worth the time. And while the economy of cooking isn’t the focus of this book, many of these recipes have a minute-to-money ratio in mind that’ll save you a few dollars here and there. Think of it as a bonus added on to all the other good reasons to cook at home.

What I believe to be the most important reason to cook is the act of cooking itself. To make it is to hop in the director’s chair of life and impart your will onto a scene—and mealtime is one of the best scenes to direct. A successful cooking session provides a feeling of triumph, a means to express oneself, and a tasty morsel to enjoy. Within this book are recipes with objective value, but also a culmination of all the run-ins with food—both bad and good—that I’ve been blessed to have. From the disappointment of overhyped restaurants to the nostalgia of my mom’s home cooking, Don’t Buy It encapsulates both the things I refuse to buy and the flavors that can’t be bought.

The last thing I will leave you with before you explore my curated collection of cookery is my disdain for absolute statements. I need you to know that Make It, Don’t Buy It is not a book of absolutes. By no means do I think you should always make tortillas or kimchi from scratch; I sure as heck don’t. But if you have the time, and if a recipe piques your curiosity, I hope to empower you to make something with your own hands—and make it better than what you can buy elsewhere.

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Some Good-to-Know Cooking Concepts

One fateful day in my high school physics class, we students were tasked with providing the teacher with instructions on making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We wrote our procedures down and watched in horror as he followed each step with a cheeky amount of verbatim. After the twelfth assembly of condiment jars on top of a base of plastic wrapped sliced bread, we all learned the importance of being thorough and clear with our instructions.

Cooking, however, is a process that has far too many details and variables to require such precision. If I wrote out the exact procedure on every recipe, this book would be a terrible reading experience. That is where these pages come in to explain various cooking concepts you will find throughout the book.

Salting

Salting by intuition is one of the most used skills in the kitchen. In some recipes there is an exact amount that can be measured, but in most cases it’s truly guesswork. A piece of poultry that I use in a dish won’t have the same amount of meat as yours. And the brand of mayonnaise I use might be saltier than yours. There are so many variables that change what the perfect amount of salt is to add to a dish that sometimes I can’t give a measurement to follow. This is where seasoning to taste comes in. Seasoning to taste means just that: Taste the food and ask yourself does this need more salt? If the answer is no, stop there. If the answer is yes, add a bit of salt and try it again. In the case of raw meats, where you definitely shouldn’t give it a taste, start by seasoning conservatively. You can always add more salt after the dish is complete. It’s much harder to take salt away.

Mixing

The act of mixing is simply to combine two or more things into one thing; how you accomplish such a thing matters not. You can mix with a spoon, your hands, a stick, or whatever instrument you fancy. Just move stuff around until it looks combined. Both beating and folding are forms of mixing, but they each have specific actions with unique purposes.

Beating

Beating is a vigorous and forceful action. It’s generally done with a whisk or hand mixer at high speed. Sometimes it’s done because the ingredients resist incorporating into each other. A common example is beating eggs, because the yolk and whites are separated by a membrane that needs to be thoroughly busted up in order to scramble the eggs fully. Beating can also be done to incorporate air into a mixture. An example of this is making whipped cream, where the beating motion aerates the cream to create a light and fluffy texture.

Folding

Folding is a much more deliberate and gentler action. Folding is used to preserve the delicate state of a certain ingredient, such as incorporating whipped egg whites into a batter without punching out the air that’s in it. Folding is done by cutting a spatula or spoon into the mixture, scraping along the bottom of the bowl toward yourself, and slowly lifting and turning the mixture over itself. You then rotate the bowl a quarter turn and repeat the folding motion until the ingredients are combined.

Knife Cuts

To cut is to make a big thing into lots of smaller things using a sharp instrument. It’s a fairly generic term, so how the cut happens depends on its descriptors in a recipe. Bite-size pieces means that it should be a size that’s comfortable to eat. No matter how you interpret a cut, just make sure they’re uniform. It’s cool if your bite size is different than mine, but having wild inconsistencies between pieces will make cooking more difficult.

Chop

There isn’t much of a dictionary difference between a cut and a chop, but I think the word chop feels a little rougher. When I say chop, I’m implying that precision or consistency is not needed whatsoever. A chop is usually a precursor to placing an ingredient in a blender or food processor, and the chop serves just as a means of reducing the size enough for it to get blended properly.

Julienne

Juliennes are long and super thin strips. These are also called matchsticks because they resemble a matchstick. You can create juliennes with a knife by first cutting the ingredient into thin square slices, then cutting the slices into planks about ⅛ inch (3mm) thick. This can also be done with a julienne peeler or mandoline slicer.

Dice

Dicing is to cut an ingredient into cubes. This is done by cutting an ingredient into slices, cutting the slices into sticks of equal width, then cutting the sticks crosswise into cubes. The width of the sticks is about ½ inch (1.25cm) for a medium dice, a ¼ inch (6mm) for a small dice, and ⅛ inch (3mm) for a fine dice. Onions are the vegetable most often diced, yet also the trickiest. As much as I want to provide everything you need in this book, dicing an onion is something you’ll need a YouTube tutorial for if you don’t already have the know-how.

Mince

Mince is the smallest denomination of chopping. It’s done when you want an ingredient to infuse flavor and aroma evenly throughout a dish without asserting itself texturally. This can be done with a chef’s knife using a rocking chop. Mincing can also be done with a garlic press or microplane.

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Essential Kitchen Tools

You don’t need a high-end kitchen to make the recipes in this book, but there are some basic tools that you’ll want to have on hand. Here are some tools I use in my kitchen.

Knives

Bread knife: Also known as a serrated knife. The toothy edge helps dig into soft things that usually squish with regular knives. Great for bread of course, but also cakes, pastries, and ripe tomatoes.

Chef’s knife: This absolute workhorse does the majority of kitchen cutting tasks. Find one with a size, weight, and shape you like and take good care of it.

Paring knife: Good for very precise tasks like hulling, peeling, trimming, and scoring. An essential tool for any fruit ninjas, because it makes quick work of strawberry tops and apple cores.

Pots and Pans

Dutch oven: The great braising beast. The heat conductivity and nonreactivity of enameled cast iron makes this the ideal