Copycat Recipes That Need No Cooking

Every recipe here is made in a bowl with a spatula. No hob, no oven, no fryer, no heat of any kind at any stage.

That makes this the collection for a hot kitchen in August, a cooker that has stopped working, a shared house where the hob is contested, or a first flat with a kettle and a fridge.

It is also the collection with the best ratio of result to effort on the whole site, because cold sauces and dry blends are where chain food's identity actually lives. Make four of these and every sandwich, every bag of oven chips and every supermarket burger you eat for the next fortnight is noticeably better.

Two rules cover all of them:

Fold, never whisk. Beating air into a mayonnaise emulsion turns it pale, foamy and thin, and it does not recover.

Rest them. Every one contains dried aromatics that need eight to twelve hours to hydrate. On the day they taste dusty; the next morning they taste like the thing. This is the single most transferable lesson on this site and it costs you nothing but patience.

Total cost for all seven: under £8, and they keep between ten days and six months.