Home-baked bread to home-school sourdough (part viii) – price check and save money

The price of flour has gone up considerably and remains stubbornly high and is now “17.8 percent more expensive than it was 12 months ago,” – updated June 13th. And still, home-baked bread’s of various kinds, shapes and sizes, are amazingly good value when compared to shop bought foam bread, “fresh bread,” various other easy-to-put-in-the-oven breads, tear-and-share breads, pizza doughs and sourdoughs.

Here’s how the numbers for home-baked bread? Working with Aldi’s The Pantry Strong White Flour 1.5kg (£1.15)* and 80 mins of oven costs (pre-heating and baking) at 50p. You can argue 10p for good quality salt (eg 225g Cornish Sea Salt – Clubcard Price £1.70) and much the same for yeast. We will come back to “Bake one, gift one,” in shortly.

You can improve on the flour costs or quality, if you are able to buy in bulk.

Farmhouse loaf

• A traditional Sainsbury’s 800g farmhouse loaf is £1.30 or 16p per 100g.
• Home-baked, a 800g farmhouse loaf requires 500g of flour, salt, yeast and utilities (38p:10p:10p:50p) £1.08p or 14p per 100g.

Sourdough

• A 400g Sainsbury sourdough is £2.00 or 50p per 100.
• Home-baked, a 400g sourdough would need just 200g of flour, salt, no yeast, utilities (23p:10p:50p) £0.83 or 21p per 100g.

Of course, the obvious adaptation here is to bake larger loaves or bake two – either reducing or halving your utilities costs. Now this is where the size and shape of the dutch oven becomes more important and why I recommend ovals over rounds!

Dough balls

Sainsbury’s offers 190g of Pizza Express dough balls and garlic butter dip at £3.80. It is tricky, as you have garlic butter dip, but you have to heat the oven. Lets round down aggressively 190g for £1.85 or approximately £1 per 100g.

Home-baked equivalent dough balls would require 125g flour, a pinch of salt, a sprinkle of yeast and a splash of olive oil if you were being authenticate with yourself plus utilities. You would be wiser to try these fast (no yeast) breads in a pan on the oven – however at most, home-baked dough balls would cost 25p per 100g.