No one will ever notice the difference… or trust your cooking ever again
By Caroline Ho, Web Editor
It happens to the best of us home chefs: You’re halfway through following a recipe when you realize you’re missing one key ingredient! Lamentably, your level of adulting is not yet advanced enough to always keep your pantry fully stocked with all of the essentials. You could admit fault for not reading the recipe fully before starting—or you could use this as an excuse to get creative and put your own unique twist on whatever you’re making with one of these brilliant substitutions.
Unsalted butter
Why not try peanut butter instead? You spread it on toast just like regular butter, so logically it must serve the exact same culinary function for all other cooking and baking. Or even better, how about shea butter! Like that haircare product your roommate’s girlfriend left in your shared bathroom. According to the label it’s 10 percent real shea butter, so just add 10 times as much conditioner as you would butter. That’s how math works, right?
Baking powder
Oh c’mon, I’m sure you have some kind of unlabeled white powder kicking around somewhere. Too valuable for this purpose? Then how about weed—hey, it gets you pretty baked.
Any and every spice
As far as your uncultured taste buds can tell, spices are all optional and interchangeable. Whatever the recipe calls for, you can simply replace it with Sriracha and/or store-bought butter chicken seasoning and/or all of the ramen sauce packets you have kicking around from every time you’ve eaten dry, uncooked noodles straight from of the package out of desperation.
Mushroom broth
Just use your own sweat and tears because you yourself are such a fun guy! Get it? Fun guy, fungi? Hahaha… no. Go pour yourself a bowl of corn flakes, you schmuck.
Red wine
Hah, you think you keep that stuff around to cook with? That’s rich (unlike you). Just use equal parts rubbing alcohol and grape juice. Bonus perk, you can feel like a Prohibition-era, rum-running, ethanol-swigging badass.
Pine nuts
Do you know how much those cost per 100 grams?? Look at Chef Fancy-Pants here, what are you trying to do, make a three-course pine nut salad, pesto pasta dinner or something? Look, just pour yourself another bowl of cereal before you get too big for your figurative britches. (But hopefully not your literal britches because if you can’t afford basic kitchen ingredients, you probably can’t afford new pants.)
