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.
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!
I think, but cannot be certain, that is includes some energy cost.
It really is excellent.
DIY bread is a real winner. Costs me about $1.05 to make a 1-lb loaf. That includes flour, yeast, salt, and gas to run the oven. An equivalent quality loaf of Safeway bakery bread costs anywhere from 3 to 6x that much. And it’s like 10-12 minutes of actual effort, including cleanup. I also make hoagy-style sandwich loaves, soft dinner rolls and other things. Same basic recipe, just a few minutes more effort to handle the dough differently. I’m totally addicted to fresh bread.
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.
Depending where you live, you may also need to heat your house anyway, so you really aren’t losing any energy at all by using the oven.
I figure more like 15 cents to bake a loaf of bread (gas oven, 15 minutes preheat, 30 minutes bake). Maybe another 20 cents if I rise it in the oven. In cold weather running the oven is essentially free, since the heat stays in the house and the furnace runs correspondingly less. In warm weather I just leave the kitchen door open to let the excess heat out.
You also have to factor in the cost of your time. If it takes longer with one or the other that needs consideration too.
I kind disagree. I admit that e.g. growing your own veg will never be cheaper than buying it at a supermarket - it would make financial sense to spend a few more hours working instead, and just buy the veg, but that kind of misses the point. Gardening, cooking, DIY… they all have a certain satisfaction and self-sufficient pride to them that money can’t buy
Yes, you’re allowed having hobbies. Not everybody is looking to do it because they love it, though, and people plowing massive time into saving a few bucks with DIY projects is a very real thing. So, it’s probably good OP mentioned it.
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Also most people can’t throttle their work hours as needed like that. We cook during free time - free as in both speech and beer.
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.
I did the math a little bit ago because I was baking a lot of bread, and I think depending on the bread it was actually cheaper to buy the same kind of loaf baked in my grocery store than to buy the equivalent ingredients. This was a Publix though which at least in my area are on the more expensive end and they didn’t have store brand bread flour so I had to go with a fancy brand.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
