Asklemmy

My homemade sourdough costs more than store bread, but not more than fancy sourdough bakery bread. I can't buy flour wholesale, don't make that much bread. But when it's good it's better than any bakery bread I've had. So, better, probably not cheaper.

Home cooked meals vs. restaurants does save money.

Gardening - most things work out cheaper than buying, though as I am a salaried worker I am not allocating labor cost.

If it were to be compared to doing 1.5x pay overtime, then working more would make more money than we could save by doing cooking and gardening, it would always work out better to spend that time at work. But then the health impact of doing all that work and always eating out would have to be factored in.

You also have to factor in the cost of your time. If it takes longer with one or the other that needs consideration too.

There is a book Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch - Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods, by Jennifer Reese

I think, but cannot be certain, that is includes some energy cost.

It really is excellent.

https://healthyfamilycookin.blogspot.com/2013/05/frugal-friday-cost-analysis-of-dried.html

I'm interested to know what power company doesn't give price for a kWh nor how many kWh you used in a billing period. It was essential when I made the switch to an EV and had to show my wife how much money we saved with electric vs gasoline.

If you don't know what your electric appliance uses to cook, you can get energy monitors that can give you the exact amount. I have an emporia car charger and a plug monitor for my mower batteries. It's as simple as setting you electricity rate in the app and setting the view to currency costs. Here's my recent usage for mowing my yard ~2 acres:

It usually costs me $0.30 to mow and trim a week compared to gasoline equivalent of my old mower and trimmer of just over a gallon per week. I pay $0.14478/kWh where I live, gas is currently $2.899/ gal. The break even for my car in efficiency is gasoline has to be around $1.50/gal iirc.

I don't have a calculation to back it up, but I'm inclined to believe store bought will always have a cheaper production cost. Your can of beans wasn't made by one person per one can of beans at a time. It is done in a factory producing millions of cans. That kind of industrial process will always be cheaper. It's designed to be that way. Beans can be bought wholesale below the cost available to you. And with that operation at scale it will undoubtedly be more energy efficient per can of beans. The consumer cost is something else. You will save money buying the raw ingredients and making your own beans rather than buying canned.

The costs of running an oven for an hour is probably costing you like 40 cents and most of that is pre heating. Buy a bread maker or a toaster oven to make your loaves in and it will be less than half that. For most cooking, the electricity used is a rounding error.

I have been the home cook for 6 people for years on a tight budget so I do this a lot.

For me it really comes down to sales and effort. I really can't beat a $.99 pound of pasta making it myself, I have tried. So i buy things like pasta, bread, tofu that I could make but the savings if any would be minimal especially after factoring in time.

Instead i use the time to make the more expensive dishes, things like pickled onions and slow roasted meats for my carnivores and compound butters and sauces and dressings. These elevate the meals and i'm able to make them far cheaper than I could buy them so the time spent ends up being worth it.

Sometimes there are sales that move all this math. My kroger just had a sale on salmon cakes, something my meat eaters love but i normally would make myself. But on sale for $2 each, i bought like 10 of them for the freezer they will be massive time savers in a pinch and will come in under what i could have prepared them for because of the sale!

shrug i cook for myself because it generally tastes better than a good 80% of restaurants in my area, usually for less money. My finances are (thankfully) not so tight that I'm calculating how much it costs to keep an oven on for 30 minutes.

Not really, no.

Mainly because my mother-in-law has read/seen one too many horror stories on the state of eatery kitchens and insists on home cooked food 24/7.

To us, the electricity and gas bill is the cost of assurance that all our food is fresh, clean and healthy.

I'm not sure where you are, but I think homemade bread is not as bad for you as mass produced.

In Poland there are small bistros that follow a tradition of communist "milk bars". Some of them even deliver in a subscription model. This totally makes sense financially if it's for just one person. You can eat there for really nice prices.

Other than that, when it's for a family of even 2, it never makes sense financially to get food delivered.

Ready to heat food is another topic. Those can also be very competitive in terms of costs and they can be really healthy as in EU it's forbidden to do any preservatives in that kind of food (frozen or pasteurized).

Doing the calculation isn't hard. It's harder to know how much energy (be it electricity, gas, or whatever) you actually use. It also varies wildly with meals, as some need multiple stove tops (is that the right term?), possibly for varying lengths of time and/or the oven.

Please note that you can not really deduce the energy consumption from a power rating, as those usually are max values and not what it'll actually need.

I have good enough energy monitoring that I can measure the usage (sort of), and having rather high electricity cost at around 0.40 €/kWh I do pay some attention to it. Running the oven for like an hour will be roughly 1€. Boiling water for pasta or something is probably more like 20 ct (includes cooking the pasta). Just using a lid actually helps a lot here if you make use of a lower power setting after reaching a boil and putting in the pasta.

It's gonna have to be a very elaborate meal to break 3€. So while it does matter and add up, compared to buying fully prepared food from a restaurant, it isn't that dramatic even with very high energy prices like these.

Cooking appliances use a lot of power, but they don't run for whole days at a time, so the energy used also isn't that dramatic. There's a relatively recent video by technology connections that goes into detail, and might be of interest (link).

It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.

In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn't have to provide so it's basically free: you'd use that energy anyway.

Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.

I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it's way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.

No, but I do try to keep prep and cleanup times to under 1 hour for breakfast and lunch combined and 1 hour for dinner.

I've been making bread regularly for years. A 1-lb loaf costs me about 90 cents USD for ingredients and 15 cents to run the oven. "Nice" Safeway bakery loaves that roughly correspond to what I make cost anywhere from $3-$6, and the whole process takes me 10-15 minutes of actual effort (including cleanup). I don't count rising and baking times because I'm doing other stuff.

Having also consumed a lot of packaged food (I'm not a crusader against it) I would say cooking meals from store-bought ingredients costs around half as much. Home-growing vegetables adds a huge amount more work. I did a garden for 2 years, many years ago - it was more of a fun project. On the scale I did it I never felt the hours of labor paid off dollar-wise. And what with mulch and other things gardening is something you can pretty much spend as much money on as you want lol.

Fun fact: if you go to the deli counter and get them to slice meat for you it's about half the price of the store-brand deli packs on the shelves, which are the exact same meats, sliced and packaged by the same people. The only difference is you stand there waiting for a minute while they do it instead just grabbing it off the shelf. The high price of even marginal convenience.

I think I did napkin math once that included cost of labour, and surprise surprise, mass production works. Just the energy is a good point too, though.

It sounds like energy pretty cheap right now. But, it's also artificially cheap unless you have a lot of renewables on your grid, and somebody somewhere is going to pay for those emissions.

I didn't do the math for bread - maybe I should reconsider that one, per the other users here.

I tried with muffins. I have been really into muffins, but it was $7 for a 4 pack. So I bought some mix, eggs, oil, etc., and made my own. I think it came out to a little less than $2 per muffin, which is pretty similar to the original, not to mention I don't have any dishes.

Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?

Nowhere near, at least in a a pressure cooker. An electric pressure cooker uses 1KW when the heater is running, and you cook the beans for about 35 minutes. The heater doesn't run the whole time but even if it did, that's around 0.6 KWH at most. And you would normally do a bigger batch than you'd get in 1 can of beans. I have been wanting to measure the actual power usage sometime.

On the dry beans vs canned beans issue, I am firmly in the "it depends" camp. If you don't plan your meals ahead of time, then dry beans become difficult to cook as you need to soak them overnight and take much longer to cook. The price of dry beans can be significantly cheaper, but strangely, not so much at a normal grocery store. I found that buying dried beans in bulk or in large bags is wildly cheaper, but most standard grocery stores (in the US) don't offer them like that so your savings are minimal and don't justify the the extra prep to me.

I'm a cook as a hobby, so typically the cost of making vs buying does not figure into my decision, except when things at the store get absurdly expensive.

A case in point: Toasted Sliced Salted Salad Almonds from Fresh Gourmet

My wife and I love these on our dinner salads so we go through a lot of them. The cost of a package of these salad almonds has risen to $7 for a 3.5oz (99g)package.

I can buy a 16oz (454g) package of raw almonds for almost the same amount of money, as the 3.5oz (99g) Fresh Gourmet package. I have an electric oven that consumes around 5kwh that runs for roughly 30 minutes during preparation and my daytime electric rate is around $0.13/kwh (I think).

Out of that I get a full pound (16oz, 454g) of salted almonds for ~$7.07 and 30 minutes of my time. I also use about $0.02 worth of salt, bringing the total cost to ~$7.09 for 4.5 times more almonds.

I also can adjust the amount of salt on them as well, as typically my wife and I like less salt that most people.

It's also fun to do.

It really depends on your energy source and your appliance, but the cost to run something like an oven for an hour is pretty negligible, especially if it's a somewhat modern appliance.

Most newer over run somewhere around 2-3,000 kwh, which nationwide averages to around .30 to .50 cents an hour.

The real cost of making food at home really just depends on how much you value your own labour/free time, and how much of a chore cooking is for you.

Something to consider is that prepared food will attract sales tax while food for cooking has either zero or reduced sales tax.

Always go homemade if you can. As much as possible. Premade shit is doo-doo for your body.