Making your own bread

[Grower08]

Is it more economical?

I mean really - you have to buy/use

-flour
-yeast
-shortening/butter
-sugar
-eggs (if necessary)
-milk (dry milk-$7:jawdrop)
-salt
-anything else?

if it's flavored - the flavoring (unless it's on-hand like old bananas or something)...

when you can buy a loaf for 1.40 or so.

Granted, making your own ensures that there are no preservatives and other bad ingredients, so that is a plus...

Any thoughts?

[Hermana Linda]

My bread contains yeast, flour, rice milk, oil, brown sugar and salt. When I estimated the cost, I only counted the flour because I use so little of everything else and they are all cheap. The yeast used to be expensive until I bought a huge bag at Costco for very little money. But, I make wheat bread, which is pretty expensive, usually. I estimate that it costs me less than a dollar a loaf, probably less, when I make it myself. It really depends on what kind of bread you are making.

[Firebird Rising]

I only use honey, flour, yeast, salt and applesauce or peanut butter. I made bread for DH and I when we were on an extremely limited budget in Nebraska ($200/mth for food on good months) I usually made two loaves every three days. DH ate about four sandwiches a day at work.

It came out to about 20 cents a loaf. I bought the flour and yeast at Sam's Club. The honey came from my in-laws (they rent out land for bee-hives every year). Extremely economical.

Jen D.

[Hermana Linda]

Flour at Sams Club would be very cheap. :yes I pay more because I insist on unbleached and my Costco doesn't have that. I mainly use whole wheat white flour or I mix whole wheat and white. I pay $3 for 5 pounds of wheat and $2 for 5 pounds of white. The yeast was very cheap, I think $3.50 for 2 pounds. I pay $2 or $3 for 2 pounds of brown sugar (no free honey here). Milk is not needed, water will do fine. I use 5 oz of cold rice milk and 5 oz of hot water. Mixed they are the temp I need.

[Zipporah]

It's not just about comparing cost per unit of bread though. The bread that you're making at home is not really comparable to what you can pick up cheaply in a supermarket. It's more more substantial and nutritious-closer to what you'd get at a bakery. If you are content to eat supermarket bread, than truthfully, I think it may be difficult to justify making it from scratch on purely economic grounds. Major companies can offer it that cheaply because, even paying for transport and labour, they can get the costs down much lower than someone can do at home.

I've just gotten back into baking sourdough again. Most of my bread has 3 ingredients: flour, water, salt. I'm in Australia and food is typically more expensive (although our dollar is lower). I'm not sure how much use my price comparisons will be but..
Including the cost of running an oven, one large (3lbish) loaf using conventional ingredients from the supermarket costs me about $1.30 a loaf. If I'm using biodynamic spelt flour, the price goes up to about $3 a loaf-add 50c if I use organic oat milk.
If I were to bother sourcing and storing larger amounts of flour, the price would come down somewhat.
FWIW-the cost of a decent but not spectacular loaf from the supermarket costs about $2.50 and a good loaf a good (expensive) bakery is close to $5 (but they would both be about 1/2 the weight so perhaps those figures need to be doubled :scratch)

[Grower08]

It's not just about comparing cost per unit of bread though. The bread that you're making at home is not really comparable to what you can pick up cheaply in a supermarket. It's more more substantial and nutritious-closer to what you'd get at a bakery. If you are content to eat supermarket bread, than truthfully, I think it may be difficult to justify making it from scratch on purely economic grounds. Major companies can offer it that cheaply because, even paying for transport and labour, they can get the costs down much lower than someone can do at home.

Good point! I enjoy making bread and I think it tastes better - but our finances are so tight right now - extremely tight. So I'm trying to see where I can cut costs. We have the ingrediants for homemade bread - so we'll be good for a while (hopefully till we get out of this slump...) so that will save us the 1.40 once or twice this month. Every little bit helps!

[itzj]

I use yeast, flour, sugar, and olive oil. We get everything at Sam's. It saves money and tastes so much better.

The place you will really save is if you expand your skills and recipes to include things like french bread, pizza dough, etc. Those bakery breads are ridiculously priced and the bread isn't hard to make.

[mountainash]

It is for me! Corn free bread takes forever to find and is super expensive! I use the bread machine and buy flour and sugar in bulk.

Our go-to recipe is simple/inexpensive:

1 cup warm water
1 packet red star yeast
3 cups bread flour or 2 cups whole wheat and 1 cup bread flour.
1/4 cup oil
1tsp salt

[Punkie]

Here are some good articles on the subject:

http://articles.urbanhomemaker.com/index.php?article=641
http://articles.urbanhomemaker.com/index.php?article=3
http://articles.urbanhomemaker.com/index.php?article=83

In order to save money, I started with a very basic hand mill. You can get them on ebay for less than $30 (less than $20 if you're willing to wait for a deal.) I bought my grains for around 30-40cents/lb. in the bulk section of our health food store. I now get them for less because I buy larger amounts and get a discount. Once I perfected cooking with freshly ground flour, we started saving for an electric mill. It has more than paid for itself :)

[sprout]

we adore homemade bread...the taste of it is just superb!

and, if you are used to good bread and buy good bread it really is better in price. I don't know if it can beat a loaf from Sam's or not.

but, the taste...oh my...and, there is nothing better than hot bread. Seriously, I have people staring at the oven...one big human, two kids and three dogs literally staring. It is quite a sight to be seen.

you have to try it...so yum!

[HindsFeet]

I'm sure I could buy white bread for cheaper - but I'm not sure about wheat. And certainly not of the same quality. FWIW, my recipe uses flour, salt, yeast, honey, and olive oil. I also add some gluten flour. I buy everything in bulk, and grind our flour, so it's pretty inexpensive.

[Grower08]

Do you all use bread machines? or the good ole fashion oven?

What is your favorite recipe?

I got some olive oil to bake with - so I'm esp. interested that recipe.

:yum

[Hermana Linda]

I just use the oven. :-)

[HindsFeet]

I mix up four loaves at a time in my Bosch and then bake in the oven.

[Zipporah]

I bake in the oven because I dislike bread machine bread. On slack days (okay, most days : shifty), I do use it for the first knead though. (It's insane to think that I own a contraption purely for mixing bread dough :-/ but dh bought it without asking me if I wanted it :doh)

[MomtoJGJ]

I use my bread machine to mix and knead, then bake in the oven. Even if it isn't a savings monetarily, it's just about even, and it's so much better for you and tastes so much better. If you use bread it would be just as easy and cheap.

I can't remember if I've posted this before, but our recipe is just flour, salt, sugar, yeast and water... and either oil, shortening, or butter... something to stick it together in my mind :) All of those things you can buy in bulk.