One example is bread. I was baking bread the other day, and obviously the cost of the ingredients I put in the loaf are less than the cost of buying a loaf at the supermarket, but that doesn’t include the cost of putting the oven on.
Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?
I know that everyone’s energy costs are different so it’s not possible for someone to do the calculations for you, but I’ve never bothered to do them for my own case because bills I get from the energy company just tell me how much I owe them for the month, not “you put the oven on for 30 minutes on the 17th of June and that cost you X”. It sounds like a headache to try calculate how much I pay for energy per meal. But if someone else has done that calculation for themselves I’d be interested to read it and see how it works out. My intuition is that, in general, it’s cheaper to make things yourself (e.g. bread or beans like above), but I couldn’t say that for sure without calculating, which as I said seems like it would be a pain in the ass.
You also have to factor in the cost of your time. If it takes longer with one or the other that needs consideration too.
Yeah, that’s a factor that is fairly easy to calculate though. And for myself, I’m happy to spend more time within reason. I cook fairly high-effort meals if I think the effort (and time) will pay off. I was mostly asking about energy costs as that’s something I feel is quite hard to quantify properly. With time you know exactly how long it takes and can ask yourself whether or not it’s worth it for you.
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.
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’m interested to know what power company doesn’t give price for a kWh nor how many kWh you used in a billing period.
Oh I get that too, I just meant that I don’t get a more detailed breakdown, just total kWh usage in a month and price. So I can’t see energy usage by day etc. I’d have to do calculations based on my oven specs and the cost of energy. Which is possible but I’m simply not bothered to do that.
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!
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.
on dry beans v canned beans
Absolutely no comparison! In any cooking method, the energy cost is a few cents, but cooking from dry is 6-8x cheaper.
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.
Dry beans weigh less
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.
I don’t have a pressure cooker and cook beans on an electric stove, but I imagine it’s similar
On a stovetop you have to soak the beans overnight and then cook them for at least an hour, so energy usage might be higher, idk. OTOH the batch size compensates for a lot.
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.
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.
How? Flour here is up to about $7 for a 5lb bag (2.2kg) and I make 2 loaves with 1kg flour, I’m at $1.50 per loaf flour only, not counting the flour that went into the starter, or electricity or time, or other ingredients (brioche uses eggs & milk, pan de mie lots of butter, sandwich bread I usually use whole wheat and some oats and milk, a little butter or olive oil, focaccia lots of olive oil, stuff like that) . I don’t even use packaged yeast and figure my cost is likely $3-4 per loaf.
Flour I buy from Costco costs 90 cents/lb, salt and yeast for one loaf are less than a nickel, and gas to run the oven (including preheat time) is like 15 cents where I live. So maybe $1.15-1.20 per loaf. I’m talking about the basic loaf of bread I make all the time. Brioche etc. will be more, and you can get as fancy as you want, but those items correspondingly cost more from a bakery too. Doing a little of the actual math, eggs are abnormally expensive right now but say $1 each, a cup and a half of milk from Safeway would add another $.65, so call it $2.80 per loaf for fancy bread that would cost 2x-3x that much already made.
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.
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).
Nice to hear that about Poland. In the US people love to have DoorDash deliver them fast food at double the price so they can spend more time consuming entertainment.
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.
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.
