What Does it Cost to Bake a Loaf of Bread?
The price of bread is getting ridiculous, but is making your own worthwhile? Have a read and find out what it actually costs.
I was running some errands on the weekend, and decided to buy some bread to have with baked beans for lunch. I opted for an in-store-made sour-dough bread that cost $3. It went great with the beans, and we all enjoyed it - but for my family of four, there wasn’t even enough left for breakfast the next day. Three bucks and “poof” - it was gone.
What struck me most was the fact that the cheapest bread I could find was $2, and the most expensive bread was over $5. The price of bread has really crept up in recent years, and bread lovers must be feeling the pinch!
Now it’s no secret that I often make my own bread, and I have videos and articles explaining how to make it with step-by-step instructions - but in this article, I thought that I would do something different, and cost-out the price of making homemade bread.
What does it cost to make a loaf?
Let’s start with the ingredients. A basic white bread requires water, salt, butter, sugar, yeast and flour. If we cost them out, we get the following values1:
So when we tally up the material cost of making one loaf of bread we get $0.85. Of course, we also have to account for the heat needed to bake it. In my case, using an electric stove for 45 minutes, at current prices - that is somewhere between $0.35 and $0.50 - so lets go with $0.50 to be conservative. Now we are at $1.35 a loaf, if you make one loaf at a time, a $1.10 a loaf if you make two at a time ((.85+.85+.50)/2), and $1.02 a loaf if you make three at a time((.85+.85+.85+.50)/3).
So there are considerable savings to be achieved my making one’s own bread, and by doing multiple loaves per batch, the savings are increased.
Still, I know there are some that will say that if the cheapest bread is $2.00, and homemade costs $1.35 a loaf (if you make a single loaf) - then what is the point of doing all that work to save only 65 cents? To that question, I would say, firstly, that savings add up over time. If you eat 2 loaves a week, that’s 104 loaves of bread a year, and that’s $67.60 saved a year. That’s not a trip to the Caribbean, but it’s also not nothing! Secondly, the notion of quality and value must be considered. A $2.00 loaf of bread is really low-value bread, both in terms of flavor, texture and the whole eating experience - but it also has less mass. Cheap bread is mostly air - whereas homemade bread is more dense. Simply put - homemade bread has more bread per loaf, such that one loaf of homemade much weigh almost twice as much as cheap store-bought - so it is empirically more valuable as well. Another important comparison, especially as you gain skill as a bread-maker, is with that of the higher-end breads since they cost much more - and so the savings are greater per loaf. Finally, for anyone that wants whole grain breads with specialized ingredients, the savings to be found by making your own bread become even more profound, since these value-added items tend to have much higher price tags.
But what about my time, doesn’t that have a value
Firstly - making bread does not take that much time. Mixing the bread takes 5 minutes, then mixing after the 1st rise takes a minute, then mixing and placing it in a pan after the second rise takes maybe 2 minutes, then placing it in the oven to bake takes a few seconds - and then there’s the clean up - which takes maybe 5 minutes in total - probably less if you are fast in the kitchen. Sure, you can’t go anywhere for the better part of 3 hours while you wait for the rising and baking times - but in terms of actual time on task - we are talking like 13 minutes (for one loaf - maybe that multiplies to 20 minutes for two or three loaves). So from this point of view it does not take much time to make bread.
Secondly - while our time on this earth is finite, and as such, it has an incredible value - for most of us, very little of our time has actual monetary value. It is true that our time has potential monetary value, but few of us are ever in a position to actualize that potential. If you are a highly paid lawyer or consultant, for whom every hour of every day is a potential commodity to be sold for money - then it is true that making bread might not be a cost-effective use of your time. But of course - very few of us live lives such as these, and thank goodness - because it sounds like a prison to me. For anyone fortunate enough to have just a regular work day, all that other time is not really money going out the window. It’s just time. So why not spend some of it making bread?
Final thoughts
There are many gurus out there in diet-land suggesting that bread should be avoided altogether - and I suppose that is one way to save money on bread - but I think that for most of us, in moderation, it’s a perfectly fine addition to a healthy diet. If the prices are getting too high, try making it with one of my easy, no-knead recipes, and maybe your morning toast will be soon be a gourmet experience, at bargain basement prices!
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Here’s an easy way to make bread:
All prices are from the “Real Canadian Superstore” website (…as of today…). For each of the calculations I take the quantity per measure, divide it by the total quantity of the item as purchased, and then multiply that by the total purchase price, to get the price by measure. So, for example, the $0.03 for 1 tbsp of sugar is the result of (15g/2000g)* $3.50. Note: the 15b/tbsp is a crude estimation - I know it varies from item to item depending on density; I just used that figure as a rounded estimation.