Buying Bread or Baking Bread?

RetracA

As the title asks - what is the cheapest method nowadays in your opinion?

SailorSam

If you want cheap bread buy it in the supermarket.
But if you want bread that tastes like bread, make it yourself and although it may cost more than the cheap stuff, ir's less expensive than the supermarkets quality bread.

trailingspouse

If you're going to use a bread maker then - well, you can buy an awful lot of bread for the cost of one. If you're going to do it the old-fashioned way, then I think it's like Sailor Sam said - homemade bread is probably cheaper than top-of-the range bought bread. However, I find it gets eaten much quicker...

krlyr

Depends. I doubt many people could beat the price of a value loaf of bread without some serious bulk buying of the raw ingredients, but the quality of HM bread is probably better than a loaf of the equivelant cost.
For example, I've been making my own bread lately, priced by ingredient going by what I paid (e.g. bottle of olive oil being half price and so on)
500g flour - 20p
350ml milk - 16p
20g golden syrup - 8p
20ml olive oil - 8p
1tsp dried yeast - 2p

72p a loaf (plus electricity costs for cooking), I could probably buy a similar sized loaf from the supermarket but mine is as fresh as you can get, I can make a loaf whenever I want because the ingredients will keep (stash of milk in the freezer), I don't have to spend petrol money getting to the supermarket just for a loaf of bread at the weekend (we don't do a set shop or anything) and it's tastier than a lot of the supermarket bread I've tasted, too. I could probably cut costs now that I know I like it as I was buying in small quantities - so a larger bag of flour would probably cut costs a lot, for example. Plus in my case you could almost forget the cost of the milk because it's a good use for excess milk we often wouldn't get through, even with splitting a bottle down into smaller quantities to freeze.

SailorSam

The biggest problem i've found since starting to make my own is HM bread is more fattening. 'Cos you can't stop eating it.

fuddle

My loaf comes in at 50p It's the 5 min bread that is on the grocery thread. I use bread flour, yeast, salt and warm water. The 50p takes into account the electric cost of using my halogen oven each time.

If I didn't have the halogen I would use the main oven and batch make a load of loaves to freeze. This would bring the cost down even further

Linda32

I'm rubbish at making bread and in my opinion as I'm rubbish at it its just plane hard work and not worth the effort to make my own. So I'm afraid its one of those things that I buy.

I always make sure I freeze half of the loaf so there isn't any chance of it going mouldy before it gets used.

RetracA

SailorSam wrote: »

The biggest problem i've found since starting to make my own is HM bread is more fattening. 'Cos you can't stop eating it.

lol - I find I also have that problem when homemade bread is baked