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I'm thinking some candies may be impossible, given the equipment required - pop rocks, for example.

Also, I've read in one of those "big secrets" books that KFC is fried in a pressure cooker. I suppose you could mimic that at home... but I wouldn't want to try.

@pumpkinbear, it's probably impossible to replicate any recipe perfectly, that's true. But there's a point where I'd say that making it at home and knowing what's in it, and tweaking tastes to you liking would make it better than the original.

There are probably some pasta shapes that would be difficult at home. Without the right dies to extrude those shapes, it just wouldn't work. But it's not like you'd have to live without pasta.

@BangieB, the KFC chicken is pressure fried from what I've heard, too. You can't do that in a regular pressure cooker, but you can buy home units for pressure frying. So while it's pretty improbable (I'm not going to spend the money on a pressure fryer any time soon) it's technically possible.

Phyllo dough is probably close to impossible.

Really terrific, charred, thin-crust pizza is quite difficult simply because home ovens don't tend to run nearly high enough. This is not to say that it's impossible to make a good pizza at home, but a rainbows-and-unicorns pizza is nearly impossible.

Most of the other things coming to mind strike me as more in the realm of "not worth the trouble" than of "impossible," though. Even cereal, which is a good example, would probably be possible to pull off, although it would be a pain and wouldn't taste 100% identical to factory-made varieties.

The Colonel did invent pressure frying, using a pressure cooker. From his 1974 autobiography: "Up until this time, I just wouldn't put my chicken in one of those deep grease fryers. Instead, I always fried my chicken slow in a cast iron skillet with an old flat iron on the lid to create pressure and make the chicken tender, like my mom used to do. Now, when I saw this newfangled pressure cookin', I couldn't believe my eyes. I'd always cooked green beans slow, two to three hours, to get the best flavor into them. Here they were cookin' green beans in just seven minutes, and they tasted wonderful. So I bought a bunch of them new pressure cookers for my new restaurant. Then I hit on the idea of fryin' chicken in the same pressure cooker. It took me awhile experimenting to get the right balance of cooking time, pressure, and amount of fat. But finally I was able to come up with a method of sealing in the chicken flavor, preserving its moisture, and giving it a soft finish that just melts in your mouth."

Well, if you want to get your hot dogs right at home, it is possible. Start with finely ground meats at low temperatures. Trim the connective tissue out before you grind, and chop the lean meats with your salt, spices and cure in a food processor. When you have a smooth consitent paste, add some shaved ice to lower the temperature (10% of your total meat batch) chopping it until smooth, and add the finely ground fat and complete the chopping process. Before you stuff it, place it in a bag and run it on a home vacuum machine to remove the air you have whipped in, otherwise you will have meat marshmallows.

You can pressure fry in a pressure cooker, some of the manuals will tell you how.

The key to matching commercial products at home is tie and creativity, breakfast cereals, extruded at high temperature and pressure are impossible, most of the rest is impractical. yes you can make a big mac at home, if you match the sauce, find the correct grilling time and temperature for the meat, make a bun with similar recipe (high sugars for the proper browning) But who wants to spend a whole day making a Big Mac?

@Ribster - the only quality of steak I haven't been able to mimic is Flemmings (which surpasses say, ruth chris by a long run, haven't been to the others on your list). I think their oven is hotter so you get the *perfect* crisp outside on even the most extra rare steak. If there isn't a Flemmings around where you live, seek one out next time you're traveling. It's worth the effort, trust me. RC ain't nothin' in comparison.

Jaden's Steamy Kitchen has a great post on making top notch steaks at home, and if you start with good steaks from the butcher and sear at high high heat on a small grill right on top of a charcol chimney, it's pretty damn close.

Alton Brown did an episode on puff pastry, and Bobby Flay (I think it was him) did an episode where he went to one of the two places in the US that were still making phyllo by hand.

I'm pretty sure that a home pasta machine wouldn't be able to get the sheets thin enough to be single phyllo sheets. I know that mine doesn't go that thin. Layered, like puff pastry or croissant dough, I can see, but not single phyllo sheets. Unless there's some technique for folding and layering, and then pulling them apart after. That stuff is thinner than most paper. A rolling pin might do it, but I suspect it's one of those things that is a dying art. And takes a heck of a lot of practice. And patience. I think I'll put it on my list of "Give this a try some day" and see how it turns out.

@Meatguy, thanks for the hot dog tip. Maybe I'll give it a try. I've made other sausages, so why not...And I'm wondering if that vacuum trick would be the key for my gyros meat, which is almost perfect...I'll have to try that next time.

As far as the Big Mac, I'm not necessarily interested in replicating recipes in my own personal quest. And yeah, replicating a Big Mac would be a serious waste of my time, since I don't like them anyway.

But I'm looking at everything in my pantry and wondering whether I can make it at home (it's a hobby, so there's no question of whether it's "worth" doing) or whether it's something that was born in the factory age and can't be done at home.

Oils are probably out of my reach, particularly the vegetable oils. I mean, I can render lard or make butter from cream, but I'm pretty skeptical that I'll ever be making my own olive oil. Obviously, olive oil predated factories, but it still requires specialized equipment and of course the olives. I don't think the ones in the jar will work.

Hillary -- brown sugar is really easy to make in a food processor!

I, for one, would love to find out how to make a homemade cheeto.

@hillary, Alton Brown made brown sugar in a recent episode. Don't recall what the topic was, but he just put white sugar in the food processor and added molasses and whizzed it around.

@eatingoutwest, would you share your cornflake method/recipe?

traditional char sui -- i've seen approximations to the hang-and-cook method using the oven, but none hold a candle to the shop-cooked stuff.

I approximate mine with a similarly flavored braised pork belly, but it's just not quite the same.