I like adding things to my icecream, usually peanut butter and frozen fruit. Got to thinking that if I added oats I could actually increase the volume without impacting the flavour all that much (I like oats). I could probably use floured starches or something like that.
Are there other things you “fill”? I think juice + water is the most familiar example. What about something like adding 20% dehydrated milk to fresh milk? Substituting some butter for oil?
Sometimes I find when I’m making my own stuff it ends up being more expensive than buying the packaged variety from the store, but maybe fillers are a way to balance that out.
Try to investigate why you’re paying more for homemade, because that seems odd. Are you doing per ingredient price breakdowns? Identify how you’re losing out and troubleshoot that in your recipes.
When I make something more expensive than store bought, I try to make sure I know why I’m doing it. I don’t trust a lot of food additives, my mindset is the price you pay with cheap food isn’t in your wallet.
Maybe dried shredded coconut in your ice cream?
In most cases its just the economy of scale at work. I cant make a pizza for what Dominos can because they buy every last one of their ingredients by the tonne.
A simple margherita is cheap to make from scratch. the toppings are the real killer.
Mainly when I created this post I was thinking of cookies and peanut butter, but also presumably ice cream. Probably a McDonalds smoothie is also cheaper than a home made smoothie (if we’re just looking at $/ml).
Granted cookies can be done cheaper, but when I made cookies on my own for the first time I was shocked by the butter content. Could buy a pack of low quality cookies for the cost of the butter in a 12 cookie recipe.