I Recreated Nara Smith's Famous DIY Condiments To Find Out If They're Genuinely Better Than Store-Bought, And I Didn't Expect These Results
She's cooking in Chanel, she's grocery shopping in Dolce & Gabbana! Who is she, you might ask? She's Nara Smith, of course!
Over the past year, the former model and mother of three has become HUGELY popular on TikTok, with over 9 million followers, and captured the attention of millions of viewers per video. Viewers are fascinated by her family, cooking, and association with the "tradwife" aesthetic. From bubble gum to cola, she's making everything from scratch and sometimes even ruffling some feathers in the process — like when she made DIY sunscreen this summer and was critiqued by doctors and skincare pros.
As a professional cook, I am always impressed by Nara's ability to look high-fashion in composed couture outfits and polished makeup while braising birria, blending roasted tomato soup, and sheeting pasta dough. To compare, I once wore mascara to work and accidentally glued my eye shut when I opened a hot oven, and the mascara on my lashes melted.
In a video with over 26 million views on TikTok alone, Nara Smith did a "pantry restock," tagged with the #easyrecipes hashtag. In the video, she made four American kitchen staples most of us would just pick up from the grocery store: ketchup, barbecue sauce, hot sauce, and last but definitely not least, ranch dressing.
To find out if she is on to something and if these condiments really are better when made at home, I followed this video word-for-word (and probably contributed to the viewer count by at least 1,000) and recreated her recipes.
Her ultra-polished, maternal persona is the definition of aspirational...but how doable are her cooking videos, really? And most importantly, is it worth the effort? I decided to find out the only way I know how: a condiment cooking SHOWDOWN.
My apron is on, my hair is tied back, and the condiment ingredients (and their store-bought counterparts) are all assembled; I'm ready to get cooking, Nara-style.
I'm sorry to disappoint, but this recreation does not include a designer fit; I stuck to my chef coat. Also, her video did not include many specific measurements or a precise cooking procedure, so I used my best judgment to fill in the blanks, and the results looked very similar to hers! Here's how I made each condiment:
FIRST UP: KETCHUP
Here's a rough explanation of what I did to recreate Nara's ketchup:
Combine 4 oz of tomato paste with 2 oz of honey, 2 oz of apple cider vinegar, and 2 oz of water in a small saucepan. Season to taste with salt and (optional) add 1 teaspoon of garlic and onion powder. Bring to a simmer over high heat and turn the heat to low once the sauce begins to boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is just past syrupy and coats the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat and cool in a container of your choosing.
This sauce was the simplest of the four to recreate with just three main ingredients and no knife skills or special equipment required.
NEXT UP: HOT SAUCE
Here's a recipe guide to follow along with me and Nara:
Thinly slice roughly half a pound (8 oz) of Fresno chili peppers** and combine them in a small saucepan (my saucepan got a good workout making these condiments) with 2 garlic cloves, 1/4 teaspoon of black peppercorns (I only had coarsely ground but Nara used whole), 2 oz of apple cider vinegar, and 4 oz of water. Season with salt to taste.
**Wear gloves while doing this, or be sure to wash your hands well immediately after handling the chili peppers! I did not wear gloves, and I regretted it for the rest of the day.
Be sure to have your vent hood or kitchen fan on; the vinegar and heat of the peppers is pungent and could irritate your eyes!
Bring to a boil on high, then lower the heat to maintain a simmer and cook for about 20 minutes.
Once your peppers have softened, blend them until smooth, strain through a sieve into a storage container, and set aside to cool. Nara's hot sauce was quite thin, so you may need to add a splash of water to get the desired hot sauce consistency. And that's it!
Recipe note: I did not see Nara cover this sauce with a lid, and what Nara says goes, but I would recommend covering it to keep spicy and vinegary vapors at bay.
NEXT UP: BARBECUE SAUCE
Now, this one is a little sauce-inception (a sauce within a sauce, if you will):
Take about half (4 oz) of the homemade ketchup you just made and combine it in a small saucepan with 2 oz of brown sugar, 1 oz of apple cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon of garlic and onion powder, 1/2 teaspoon of paprika, 1/2 teaspoon of chile powder, and salt and pepper to taste.
Double, bubble, toil, and trouble!
Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is shiny and thick. Remove from the heat and transfer into a container to cool.
Recipe note: Be sure to scrape down the sides of the pan every so often while making Nara's barbecue sauce. The sauce at the edges of the pan will reduce faster than the center, and we want to make sure nothing gets over-reduced and burnt! With its high sugar content, this barbecue sauce can burn quickly, so watch your pan carefully.
AND, FINALLY: RANCH DRESSING
At last, my saucepan gets to rest; no heat is required for this one! Here's how Nara's ranch came together:
Finely slice 2 tablespoons (2-3 scallions) of scallion, and mince 2 tablespoons of dill and 2 tablespoons of parsley. Then, in a bowl, combine 4 oz sour cream, 4 oz mayonnaise, 4 oz of whole milk, the chopped herbs, 1 teaspoon of garlic and onion powder, 1 oz of lemon juice, and salt to taste. And that's it! Transfer into a storage container until you're ready to eat.
This condiment took veryyy little time to make and smelled amazing from the fresh herbs and lemon.
They call Nara ranch cause she be dressing.
Before I share my final results and ratings, let's discuss the money side of our experiment, Nara's homemade vs. storebought.
First, you'll find the overall cost of each store-bought condiment, broken down further into its cost per ounce — I used this to compare the value of the homemade condiments to the store-bought ones.
Before I did that, however, I had to use ALL of my high school algebra skills to determine each homemade condiment's cost per ounce. Here's an overwhelming spreadsheet to show you what I did:
Just take my word for it. The price per ounce of homemade ketchup is $0.61.
Here is a graph summarizing the price per ounce cost differences for each condiment, Nara's version (purple) and store-bought (yellow):
As you can see, there was a HUGE range for store-bought price per ounce vs. homemade.
So, finally, it's time to taste and decide — once and for all — if Nara is right about making your own condiments
With the sauces prepared and the cost of each ingredient and condiment weighed out, all I needed to start my saucy evaluation was an accompaniment to these sauces that even Nara Smith would approve of...so I made homemade french fries.
Finally, it was time to taste and decide — once and for all — if Nara is right about making your own condiments.
Here are the criteria I took into consideration during my taste test:
Overall taste (out of 5)
Ease (out of 5)
Value (out of 5)
I also rated each condiment's similarity (out of 5) to the store-bought, but I kept these ratings separate from the overall score because a condiment — I'm looking at you, ranch — might taste different from the original in a good way. I didn't want a poor similarity score to impact the overall score negatively.
🍅 KETCHUP REVIEW:
TASTE: Tasting this homemade ketchup made me realize just how little tomato flavor is actually in name-brand ketchup because, wowza, the tomato flavor in Nara Smith's version was punchy and delicious. The store-bought ketchup was more acidic and sweeter than the homemade. All that said, I still tasted the homemade version and immediately thought, "Yup, that's ketchup," which is all that matters.
APPEARANCE/TEXTURE: The texture was silky smooth and gel-like. The homemade version's texture was looser, more sauce-like, and more natural-looking than the store-bought version. The homemade ketchup didn't hold its shape like the store-bought version did, and when I tried spreading it on a hot dog, instead of a perfect line of red sauce, Nara's version kind of oozed to the side of the dog and seeped into the bun. That's not exactly what you want from ketchup.
COST: As the two main ingredients for Nara's version, tomato paste and honey, are both fairly expensive pantry items, it makes sense that the homemade ketchup would be costly per ounce. Still, I did not expect the store-bought version to be so much cheaper!
OVERALL SCORE FOR KETCHUP: 3.7/5
Overall taste: 4/5
Ease: 5/5
Value: 2/5
Similarity: 3/5
🍖 BARBECUE SAUCE REVIEW:
TASTE: The homemade version was bright, sweet, and peppery but didn't have a huge depth of flavor (surprising, given the inclusion of the umami bomb, Worcestershire sauce, one of my favorite pantry staples). I used visual cues to decide what spices to add because Nara's video didn't specify, and if it were my recipe, I would have thrown some hot sauce into the mix. Honestly, the store-bought version's flavors felt more balanced than Nara's.
APPEARANCE/TEXTURE: Like the homemade ketchup, the homemade barbecue sauce was looser and less gel-like than the store-bought version. Still, the homemade version was glossy and emulsified. Looking at the sauces side-by-side, dipping a fry into each, and seeing the sauce cling to a piece of food really highlighted how perfectly smooth and freakishly silky the store-bought version is. Maybe this is a personal preference, but I like an imperfect sauce with natural flaws and inconsistencies.
COST: This sauce is three times more expensive to make at home than buy. That's a hard fact for any aspiring "tradwife" to swallow.
OVERALL SCORE FOR BARBECUE SAUCE: 3/5
Overall taste: 3/5
Ease: 4/5
Value: 2/5
Similarity: 2/5
🌶️ HOT SAUCE REVIEW:
TASTE: I LOVE trying different hot peppers and sauces side-by-side because different spicy foods hit different parts of your tongue. The heat from the homemade sauce hit the tip of my tongue immediately and dissipated quickly, while the heat from the store-bought hit a little later in the back of my throat and lingered for a moment. It also wasn't too spicy, and I noticed it had a pleasant amount of vegetal flavor/aroma, which I think came from using fresh chilis and garlic. In contrast, the predominant flavor in the store-bought hot sauce was acid and salt. Maybe if I had added more vinegar and seasoning to Nara's version, the taste would have been closer to the store-bought. Still, I liked the heat and fresh pepper flavor of the homemade version.
APPEARANCE/TEXTURE: These sauces were very similar in color and texture. Although Fresno chilis are bright red, the homemade sauce blended into a beautiful orange color that looked like the store-bought. Because I strained the sauce, the texture was very similar to the manufactured sauce, too.
COST: The hot sauce was the most economical of all the homemade condiments by a long shot. My explanation of why hot sauce is so much more expensive per ounce than the other condiments is twofold: first, hot sauces are often fermented, and that preservation process takes time, and as we all know, time is money; second, hot sauce is purchased in far less quantity than other condiments (for example, the hot sauce bottle I bought was about 5 ounces, while the barbecue sauce I bought was 18 ounces).
OVERALL SCORE FOR HOT SAUCE: 4/5
Overall taste: 4/5
Ease: 3/5
Value: 5/5
Similarity: 3/5
🌱 RANCH DRESSING REVIEW:
TASTE: Do we actually believe Nara could improve upon this classic condiment?? I was skeptical until I tasted her version, so consider me gobsmacked! The perfect sauce for everything from pizza to baby carrots, I didn't realize the creamy, herbaceous dressing could be improved upon. Nara's version had so much more flavor than the storebought! Fresh lemon juice brightened up the condiment's sour cream and mayonnaise base, and the fresh herbs really shined in the homemade version. The store-bought dressing had more of a vinegary taste, and there was a hint of garlic and onion, but no dill or parsley flavor came through for me.
APPEARANCE/TEXTURE: The homemade ranch looked pretty different from the storebought because of the fresh herbs (and, I think, the lack of preservatives and stabilizers). The store-bought ranch was more greasy and looser than Nara's. Even though the homemade version resembled more of a dip than a dressing, I found it more appealing, and the texture was more appetizing to me.
COST: Store-bought and homemade are neck-in-neck in terms of price. Considering how many whole dairy products and fresh ingredients were used in Nara's version, I was so surprised to see that it basically costs the same per ounce to buy the store-bought version, which has vegetable oil and water as the first to list ingredients. Nara's version took about ten minutes to make and used no special equipment, so in terms of bang for your buck, I'd say make it yourself!
OVERALL RANCH DRESSING SCORE: 4.3/5
Overall taste: 5/5
Ease: 4/5
Value: 4/5
Similarity: 2/5
FINAL TAKEAWAYS:
We're basically twins!
If you enjoy cooking, definitely try making condiments like Nara! And if you like ranch, you simply MUST try making your own with Nara's recipe. If you are a ketchup fan, however, keep your pantry stocked up with the o.g., store-bought version because there's nothing like it.
With the highest overall score, Nara's ranch dressing is the homemade condiment I was most impressed with, both for its flavor and appearance, which I thought were better than the store-bought ranch and for its competitive price per ounce! I will 100% percent follow Nara's example and make my own ranch dressing from now on. Are you with me?
The biggest letdown for me was the homemade barbeque sauce. With Worcestershire sauce and brown sugar, I thought its flavor would pass the grocery store version with flying colors, but sadly, the store-bought one was more balanced, sweet, and tangy than the one I made at home. Hopefully, no one will make me rescind my chef card for it.
The hot sauce was another pleasant surprise for me. Cooking with hot peppers can be intimidating for people unfamiliar with them, but Nara's hot sauce uses an approachable recipe and straightforward method to introduce you to the world of chilies. With only three ingredients, this homemade hot sauce had a big payoff.
My feelings about the ketchup are mixed. I preferred the texture of the homemade, but it differed a lot from the smooth, store-bought version we know and love. The same goes for the taste.
But did I answer my initial question: Is making condiments at home instead of just buying them worth it? I want to know what you think. Let me know in the comments below.
