The best-tasting food is the kind that comes from your own efforts, because victory tastes oh-so-sweet. Conquer KFC-style fried chicken, smoky barbecue, wood-fired pizza, five-minute bread, and other DIY delicacies with these great food-focused projects.


Photo from The Pizza Hacker.

We've previously tackled 10 clever kitchen repurposing tricks and food and drink hacks, but this here is a compendium of more involved, fare more awesome projects that actually create food and drinks you can brag about.


10. Put Your Chicken on a "Throne" for Crispy Skin and Moist Meat

It's a pretty light project, but you certainly get your hands dirty. Cooking chicken so that it's standing up, with a can of liquid inside its carcass, ensures that the skin gets the perfect kind of crisp you're looking for, but the inner meat stays juicy, thanks to the steam coming from the can. You can watch Christopher Walken—yep, that Christopher Walken—demonstrate a fancier indoor method in the video, or read up on how to make it on the grill.



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9. Make Crispy Wings at Home in the Oven


Chicken wings you get at the bar are crispy, but their sauce sticks right to them. Wings you make at home in the oven are slick, and you're lucky if half the sauce stays on. The solution? Baking powder, along with some overnight, open-air refrigeration before cooking. You get healthier wings you can cook at home, and a great feeling of having somehow beaten the takeout economy. (Original post)




8. Brew Your Own Beer and Soda


You'd think homebrew beer or soda would be a pretty huge undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. Starting out with either project is nothing more than a weekend afternoon spent with some beginner's materials. Guided tours and cost analyses of DIY brew are provided by the Wise Bread and The Simple Dollar, while a great video on making your own 2-liter soda experiments is offered at Howcast. (Original posts: beer, soda).



Halve Your Beer Tab by Brewing Your Own If you view brewing your own beer as an esoteric hobby reserved for true beer geeks, you might want Read more


7. Fry Some KFC-Style Chicken at Home


The Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices do a good enough job when you want the bucket, but if you want the good stuff at home—or you're not a huge fan of MSG—you can pick up the mix provided by the Guardian UK's Word of Mouth blog. Many testers claim it to provide the same kind of mouth-filling feeling as the KFC's version, though if you disagree, the theoretically secret recipe is offered at the post, too, coming from Ron Douglas' America's Most Wanted Recipes. (Original post)




6. Make Fresh Bread Without a Bread Maker


First came the no-knead bread, and it was declared good. Then there came faster and whole wheat remixes, and it couldn't seem to get better. But then came another no-bread-machine-needed recipe, a mix-once, break-off-and-bake dough recipe that our own Jason tested and loved, and then a recipe that rises while you're at work for about a minute of prep time. There is nothing quite like fresh-baked bread, and that's all we have to say on that. (Original posts: no-knead, faster and whole wheat, five minutes, one-minute).




5. Use Sous-Vide Techniques for Perfect Done-Ness


You have to do it right, and you have to do it safe. Once you commit to sous-vide cooking and try a slice of steak, though, you'll want to make the commitment. The Serious Eats blog detailed a very do-able cooler technique, along with instructions on making the best prime steaks in that cooler. Savvy Housekeeping has also explained DIY sous-vide, for comparison's sake, and reader Jeff showed us how to take your DIY to drastically cool levels with an arduino-powered, self-monitoring sous-vide cooler. Soon enough, you'll be making dinners you want to invite guests over for, and you'll be free to actually talk to them while it's cooking. (Original posts: cooler sous-vide, steaks, sous-vide retake, electronic cooler).




4. Grind Your Own Meat to Replicate Great Burgers


Most of the burger places you hear people preach and brag about grind their own meat. It's safer than relying on mass-produced, clumped-together stuff, and you get total quality and taste control. Mix together some chuck, sirloin, and maybe even brisket, and you get great burgers that taste like the steak they might have also become. KitchenAid machines have good attachments for meat grinding, but you can also use a standard food processor. Once you're comfortable cutting up your own burger meat, you can step up to the plate and make something like at-home Shake Shack burgers. Photo by VirtualErn. (Original posts: grinding, Shake Shack).




3. Smoke Food Without Building a Shed


Most of us lack a converted oil pipe, a tin roof shack, or the other elements of authentic smoked barbecue, to say nothing of the space, money, and time commitments. Without serious masonry skills, you can still get the deep, grin-inducing flavor of smoked meats and other 'cue favorites. There is Alton Brown's original terra cotta pot smoker and a flower pot variation, and then there's a conversion process for your standard, trusty Weber charcoal grill. For those trapped indoors by apartment leases or inclement weather, a wok can step in as a smoker, too. (Original posts: flower pot, charcoal grill, wok).



Make a DIY Flower-Pot Smoker There are few things in this world as great as slow-cooked, smoked meat, but popular smokers can… Read more


2. Quickly Create Ice Cream and Other Frozen Desserts


Like pizza ovens, Lifehacker's obsession with instant ice cream recipes and techniques started off as a kind of "ooh, neat" post. Then, suddenly, there were links and clever photo illustrations everywhere. Adam rounded up a bunch of our favorites, but we've also since discovered our love for two-ingredient ice cream and the beauty of frozen bananas blended to a creamy pulp. (Original posts: two ingredients, banana ice cream).




1. Cook Your Pizza in a Homemade Pizza Oven


The place around the corner with the great pies can get their oven really hot, much hotter than the conventional kind. That's why pizza snobs are so enthused about building their own pizza ovens, to cook their dough, sauce, and cheese combinations just so. We've featured wood-fired, cement-placed pompeii ovens, a more stand-alone brick oven, a standard oven filled with bricks and aluminum foil, a temporary model, and conversions and make-do models done with Weber grills (now sold as DIY PizzaForge kits) and cast iron skillets. If one of them fires your imagination, just remember to save a slice now and then for someone else.




What's the neatest, most simple, or most amazingly detailed and complex DIY food project you've seen on Lifehacker or elsewhere? Lay down the links and reviews in the comments.

