Top 10 Homemade Versions of Things We Love

Making your own versions of great food and clever gadgets is already rewarding, and if you play your cards right, the homemade route also comes with serious bragging rights. These 10 economical homemade creations—epicurean and electrical—should inspire some well-deserved praise.

10. Ice cream creations

The moment you discover you're out of ice cream, at that crucial just-enough-room-left moment, is a very bad moment, indeed. You can make a substitute in about five minutes, or forge a vanilla bean substitute if it's more your speed. For more fixes and crafty dessert ideas, try our favorite homemade ice cream recipes.

9. Pizza ovens

There's an entire realm of new restaurants opening on the premise that pizza baked in wood-fired ovens tastes great, and is worth the extra time and money over your favorite napkin-soaking corner joint. We're of the mind that you shouldn't have to drop a C-note to feed a family with great pizza. We started our obsession with a temporary bricks-in-oven setup, then moved on to a small but efficient backyard model. We hit our apex with stomachs growling by glimpsing at a backyard, concrete-seated pompeii oven, and then brought it all back home with an oven you can build in one afternoon. Pizza—it inspires our readers, and makes us hunt for ever more tasty step-by-step pictures.

8. DTV Antenna

Okay, we don't actually love collections of specially-spaced wire connected by coaxial cable, but we do love the free, often high-definition television content that's floating through the air. It is, after all, the missing link between a cable-free life and "What about sports and events?" We really dislike paying $40 or more for a really crappy model with a six-foot cord, though. That's why this homemade version, which you can run as much cord as you want to and place anywhere, is so appealing. Judging from our commenters and own experience, it's also a lot more successful at grabbing channels from multiple stations, which is reason enough to dismantle some wire hangers and grab a two-by-four. (Original post)

7. Ginger ale and other sodas

There are only so many brands of the fizzy stuff at your grocer, and it's all about the same price. Wanna jazz up your soft drink selection? Make your own home-brewed ginger ale and other sodas, tweaking the flavor profile, sugar amounts, and carbonation to your liking. We started down this road with a ginger ale made from real ginger, but picked up a ginger-syrup-based version and a smaller batch carbonated with yeast. Finally, we heeded Howcast's advice on making any kind of soda yourself, yielding two 2L bottles that keep for up to a month. Needless to say, all of this stuff tastes how you want it, and might even go well with the harder stuff.

6. Sports drink

Not that there's anything wrong with the neon-colored stuff, but concocting your own is cheaper, slightly more natural, and amenable to having the flu and really not wanting to drive to the drug store. We've recently seen fairly well-tested recipes from the New York Times' Well blog, and WebMD also has its mix. (Original posts: first, second).

5. Sun jars

Jason dug the idea of solar-powered backyard lights, but not the looks of them. So he read through this Instructables tutorial, picked up on some of the commenters' suggestions, and added a few of his own ideas, like DIY frosting, and came up with his own mason-style sun jars. They can be any color you please, you can hack together as many as you need, and your deck doesn't look like part of a home improvement store flyer illustration.

4. Shake Shack burgers and crispy fries

Lots of people love the burgers from NYC's Shake Shack, enough so to put up with rather sizable lines. Burger researcher extraordinaire J. Kenji Lopez-Alt went to the trouble of reverse engineering their recipe, right down to the smash-and-scrape griddle technique. For the natural accompaniment, soak and fry some potato wedges for unbeatable French fries. Photo by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.(Original posts: burgers, fries).

3. Home theater PCs

They're not exactly something you can pick up at any old electronics store, but TV-attached PCs are coming into their own. There's the upcoming Boxee box, the Popcorn Hour, and a number of HD TVs arriving with streaming capabilities built in. If you'd like a bit more flexibility with your media, both downloaded and streamed, it's not too hard to set up your own little media computer that fits snugly into your home theater setup. Adam's silent, standalone XBMC-based setup is a super-slim little box that has just enough oomph to stream videos, and runs about $200. Me, I sprung for a cheap but powerful Boxee media center, boasting a spacious hard drive, 2 GB of memory, and the same kind of powerful graphics chip.

2. Kentucky Fried Chicken

Even if you know the Colonel's "11 herbs and spices"—and one of them appears to be a heavy dose of monosodium glutamate—it's hard to replicate the high-pressure deep fryer results of actual KFC. That didn't stop Tim Hayward and readers of his Word of Mouth blog from crowd-sourcing the best possible KFC stand-in. His post also lists the spice mixture from America's Most Wanted Recipes, so you can get in on that "facepunch" MSG factor if you'd like. (Original post).

1. Hackintosh running Snow Leopard

The Apple Tax—the difference between a Mac's hardware costs and what the Cupertino company charges—is steep, but you can endlessly argue its justification. If you don't want to pay it, or would rather get a bit more choice in your hardware peripherals, you can build a system and install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on it. Adam's chosen hardware setup is how he can (mostly) assure success with the process, but by crafting your own "Hackintosh," you get a choice of case, memory amount, processor speed, and other factors normally left to the whims of yearly inventory updates.