Is it worth it to bake your own bread?

Bread in the store is quite expensive. I guess you can get airbread for something like $1.00 a loaf, or sometimes cheaper, but there's a reason it's that cheap. But the better-tasting bread that actually has some nutritional value can cost several dollars.

Many people turn to making homemade bread in an effort to save money on bread. A lot of people insist it saves them money, even if they've never calculated how much it actually costs. But I have also started to see comments from people who say, "I thought I would try to save money by making my own bread, but then after buying all the ingredients I realized that I had already spent a lot more than if I had just bought it." And then you also have to consider if it's worth it to you to spend the time to make it.

Now, one thing that is important to remember is that a very valuable aspect of making homemade bread is that you know exactly what is in your bread. Every single one of the ingredients you put in is something that you can pronounce. And there are a lot of health and taste benefits to making homemade bread. For many people, this is enough, even if it's more expensive to make it than to buy it.

But cost is still a consideration.

So I decided to do some research and calculating and see how much it costs to make one of my recipes for whole wheat bread. This is the recipe:

Crunchy Wheat and Honey Bread

1 1/4 cups water

3 tbsp. honey

2 tbsp. margarine or butter, softened

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp. salt

1 1/4 tsp. yeast

I just throw all of these into my bread machine, and let it run through the dough cycle. Then I shape it into a loaf and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes in my oven.

Wheat
Several places on the internet say 1 cup wheat kernels yields about 1 1/2 cups flour. That's approximately what I usually get when I grind just enough for the recipe I'm making.
There are 56 cups of white wheat in a 25 lb. bag (based on what I measured myself).
White wheat from the cannery costs $11.45 for a 25 lb. bag. (See the order form at providentliving.org.)
A little calculating:
(56 cups wheat kernels) X [(1.5 cups wheat flour)/(1 cup wheat kernels)]=84 cups wheat flour from a 25 lb. bag of wheat
The price per cup of whole wheat flour from the cannery is $11.45/84=$0.14 for one cup of flour.

Now that I've calculated that, below is a spreadsheet that shows the price of a 1 lb. loaf of bread using ingredients exclusively purchased at Kroger, Harris Teeter, and Costco, respectively. Costco doesn't have whole wheat flour here, so I used the price of whole wheat flour at Kroger for that table. The last table calculates the price of making this recipe if I use wheat from the cannery and the rest of the ingredients from whichever store has it for the best price per unit.

I should note that prices for many foods are going up or will go up soon, so these calculations might not be accurate in a couple of months, but I thought I would post this anyway, and then after prices have changed I can do this again and it will be interesting to see what effect it has had.



Explanation of columns in the table:

• Ingredient: I think this is self-explanatory. I am assuming the price of the water is negligible, which it probably is, and the price would be difficult to calculate anyway.
• Price and Amount: These give the price of a bag or box of that ingredient, and the amount of the ingredient in the bag or box.
• Price/unit: This is the number in Price divided by the number in Amount, rounded to three decimal places.
• Unit/measurement: This is copied straight from the table at the top of the spreadsheet. I found these values from the website shown below the conversions. The website converts amounts of various kitchen ingredients between different units of measurement. Since most ingredients are sold by the pound or ounce, I needed these to convert the numbers to cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.
• Amount required for recipe: copied straight from the recipe, although fractions were converted to decimals.
• Price for recipe: This is the product of price/unit, unit/measurement, and amount required for recipe. It is the amount the you are paying for that particular ingredient every time you make bread.
• The total price to make a 1 lb. loaf of bread is in bold beneath each table.
• Below that is the total price of all the ingredients except whole wheat flour and all-purpose flour.

Observations:

• If you use the least expensive ingredients and cannery wheat, a loaf of this bread costs 50 cents.
• Cannery wheat actually isn't much cheaper than store-bought wheat right now, although normally wheat costs about half of what it does right now. Right now the savings are less than a cent per loaf.
• Yeast from the grocery store is a lot more expensive than if you buy it in bulk at Costco. At Kroger and Harris Teeter, the total price of all ingredients except the flours is nearly half the price of the entire loaf, and this is largely because the yeast costs so much. So just buying yeast at Costco decreases a good portion of the cost per loaf.
• Before I did this spreadsheet I had been assuming that all the ingredients except the flour were pretty negligible and would only account for a few cents. But even using the least expensive ingredients, that was still 14 cents per loaf. It's still not very much, but it's more than I expected.
• Flour is a little less expensive at Kroger than Costco. I had been assuming that Costco's all-purpose flour must be the cheapest, but then again the price of flour at Costco has risen a little bit recently.
• All-purpose flour is less expensive than whole wheat flour, even if you grind it yourself, although when wheat kernels are less expensive the price is probably fairly similar.

So if you only take into account the price of the ingredients, it is probably cheaper to make your own whole wheat bread. You do also have to consider if the time is worth it to you, as well as what equipment you are planning to use. If you are grinding your own wheat, you will also need a wheat grinder, or you'll need to factor in the time spent using a mortar and pestle. If you don't want to mix the bread by hand, you will need a bread maker or a mixer. A mixer and a wheat grinder could cost about $600, so you would need to consider how much use you get out of those before they break down, and if you would save enough money making your own bread to justify the cost of those.

Note: I added a new table to the spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take for an appliance to "pay for itself" in the amount of money you would save by using it. The first column tries various prices for one loaf of bread bought at the store, and the second shows how much you would save by making your own with my recipe. The rest of the columns show how many loaves of bread you would have to make before you would save as much money as you have paid for the mixer or wheat grinder. So if you think about which bread you buy from the store, how often you would make bread instead, and how much bread you make each time, then that can give you an idea of how long it would take to pay for that appliance in savings.

Some more thoughts: Another thing to keep in mind is that homemade bread seems to disappear faster than storebought bread. That's partly because everyone is so excited about the warm bread that it disappears in the first hour, and partly because it's hard to slice it as thin and each slice is more dense than the store's airbread. But that could be a good thing because your family is consuming lots of nutritious and delicious bread. I also find that homemade bread makes me feel full faster and helps me feel full longer than storebought bread. I guess for me, I've stopped wondering if I'm saving money or not by making homemade bread, because I love the taste and the nutritional benefits enough that it doesn't matter to me. You have to make that decision for yourself.