Regular bread making for cost cutting
Recently (a few weeks ago) we purchased a couple of kilos of a good grade, cheap flour here in NZ, along with a package of 1kg of raw sugar. The first part of this was used up making the cookies last weekend. The rest has gone into making loaves of good quality, long fermented bread. The results so far have been good: one loaf 2-3 days ago, which allowed Kiana to take homemade bread to work, along with pork in a coriander and marjoram sauce cooked the previous night, to make a panini of sorts with salad/cheese which turned out to be filling. Another loaf will be baked tonight as we finally made our way through the last loaf.
What I've found: 2-3 small cups of flour (not metric cups) go into each small loaf of bread. If I count the cookies as a loaf, we might get five loaves out of our 2.5kg of flour... or 500g of flour per loaf. I'd estimate 50g of sugar and 2 teaspoons of yeast, and maybe a cup or so of milk. Today I added yoghurt as well for the milk-fat, bacterial variety etc. When all this is added up, the financial costs of making bread to last for a week or 2, definitely outweigh the financial outlay.
What doesn't outweigh of course is the time-cost for making the loaves. When you take into account about a half hour or so to make the dough, with constant kneading and adjustment of the ratios of ingredients, and then the occasional changing of the cloth on top of the dough, and finally the 30-40 minutes baking time at 180 degrees Celsius, some people might argue time could be used a lot better. But, if you have someone in your household who has the time to do this, it is definitely an improvement to financial efficiency.
Why? Because nowadays, even a substandard quality loaf of bread is at least $3.50, a good quality loaf up to $5 or more. When you take into consideration that an average household might use 3 loaves or more of bread a week, making your own starts to make a hell of a lot of financial sense. Even if you still use one commercially made loaf per week, its a $7-$10 cost cutting saving per week, maybe more. Granted, its not a major component of a weekly grocery spend - dairy and meat tends to make up the largest component... but combine buying bulk cheese/milk from a large supermarket or even a farmers market with the bread making, and add precooked meals to that rather than eating out as much, and you save quite a lot. And your health benefits as a result, since homemade meals often tend to be much more thoughfully prepared.
I'd even go so far as to say, were it possible for one person of a partnership to earn 50K or greater, having the other person exert themselves in the cost cutting/saving department with a great deal of industry could lead to a situation where it becomes possible to trade off working for periods of months comfortably while still saving money. This means development of a lot of personal satisfaction in self-reliance. Really, the major component of everyones spend each week is rent of an apartment nowadays... take that away by state assistance and the cost of living could go down dramatically.
What I've found: 2-3 small cups of flour (not metric cups) go into each small loaf of bread. If I count the cookies as a loaf, we might get five loaves out of our 2.5kg of flour... or 500g of flour per loaf. I'd estimate 50g of sugar and 2 teaspoons of yeast, and maybe a cup or so of milk. Today I added yoghurt as well for the milk-fat, bacterial variety etc. When all this is added up, the financial costs of making bread to last for a week or 2, definitely outweigh the financial outlay.
What doesn't outweigh of course is the time-cost for making the loaves. When you take into account about a half hour or so to make the dough, with constant kneading and adjustment of the ratios of ingredients, and then the occasional changing of the cloth on top of the dough, and finally the 30-40 minutes baking time at 180 degrees Celsius, some people might argue time could be used a lot better. But, if you have someone in your household who has the time to do this, it is definitely an improvement to financial efficiency.
Why? Because nowadays, even a substandard quality loaf of bread is at least $3.50, a good quality loaf up to $5 or more. When you take into consideration that an average household might use 3 loaves or more of bread a week, making your own starts to make a hell of a lot of financial sense. Even if you still use one commercially made loaf per week, its a $7-$10 cost cutting saving per week, maybe more. Granted, its not a major component of a weekly grocery spend - dairy and meat tends to make up the largest component... but combine buying bulk cheese/milk from a large supermarket or even a farmers market with the bread making, and add precooked meals to that rather than eating out as much, and you save quite a lot. And your health benefits as a result, since homemade meals often tend to be much more thoughfully prepared.
I'd even go so far as to say, were it possible for one person of a partnership to earn 50K or greater, having the other person exert themselves in the cost cutting/saving department with a great deal of industry could lead to a situation where it becomes possible to trade off working for periods of months comfortably while still saving money. This means development of a lot of personal satisfaction in self-reliance. Really, the major component of everyones spend each week is rent of an apartment nowadays... take that away by state assistance and the cost of living could go down dramatically.