The Real Cost Of Making Your Own Marinade From Scratch
Making your own marinade sounds cheaper than buying one. You've got spices in the cabinet, yogurt in the fridge, and a recipe from the internet. How hard can it be?
We decided to find out. We priced out every ingredient in our Korean Yogurt Marinade Spices — one of our most popular blends — to see what it would actually cost to make it yourself from scratch.
The Ingredients
Our Korean blend contains gochugaru, cumin, black pepper, raw sugar, mustard powder, smoked paprika, cayenne, and garlic powder. That's eight ingredients.
To buy each one individually at a typical grocery store, you're looking at roughly $4 to $8 per jar depending on brand and size. Specialty ingredients like gochugaru might run $8 to $12 for a bag you'll barely dent.
The Math
Even being conservative — assuming you already own half the spices — filling in the gaps for a single blend costs $25 to $40 in individual spice purchases. And you'll use a fraction of each jar for one marinade.
Now multiply that by ten if you want to try Korean, Greek, Thai, Jamaican, Moroccan, Lebanese, Indian, Turkish, Peruvian, and French. You're looking at 35+ unique spices, many of which you'll use once and forget about. The total easily crosses $150 to $200 in spice purchases.
The Hidden Cost: Waste
Ground spices lose potency within six months of opening. Whole spices last longer, but then you need a grinder. Most home cooks buy a jar of sumac or galangal for one recipe, use a teaspoon, and watch it sit in the back of the cabinet for two years until they throw it out.
That's the real cost of DIY marinades: not the money you spend, but the money you waste on spices that go stale before you use them again.
The Comparison
Our 5-packet Sampler is $39 with free shipping — five packets of your choice, each containing 8 to 13 whole spice ingredients. One packet makes yogurt marinade for 2 lbs of meat. That's five different cuisines for less than what you'd spend buying the spices for two of them from scratch.
At the 30-packet Stock Up tier, you're paying as little as $3.30 per packet — about $1.65 per pound of perfectly marinated meat. A single jar of gochugaru costs more than that.
So Should You Make Your Own?
If you love the process of sourcing, measuring, and blending spices — absolutely. It's a rewarding hobby and we're not here to talk you out of it. We even list every ingredient on our website if you want to try.
But if what you really want is incredible flavor with whole spice ingredients, sixty-second prep, and no waste — that's what we built. One packet. 2 lbs of meat. One minute. Done.