Bread is getting very expensive! Of course, so is everything else, but baking your own bread can help significantly with the grocery bill. I saw a blog post in a Finnish financial blog about food prices. According to her research, the grain products have increased 45% in price this year, and 57% since 2019. The official numbers are lower, of course.
I started to bake my own bread more after deciding to get a stand mixer, which I had thought about for a long time. Is it just a a big, heavy, expensive piece of clutter? Or will it really make a difference in how much I bake? I found a KitchenAid stand mixer at an online flea market and bought it, maybe four or so years ago, and never looked back. It did indeed make baking anything that needs kneading so much easier! Now that the joints in my hands are arthritic, I definitely could not do proper kneading by hand.
Recently I got some sourdough starter from a pastor family in another church, and learned to make sourdough bread. DD has a sensitive stomach, and I was thinking that yeast free bread might suit her better. I don't currently eat bread at all due to Crohn's disease flare, but I decided to just train myself in self discipline when being around freshly baked, delicious bread! After this flare settles, I may try eating some sourdough bread, and maybe my stomach can handle it..
Sourdough bread doesn't require kneading, but the elasticity and stretchiness comes from the sourdough starter doing its job. You can gently stretch and fold the dough occasionally, but it is not absolutely necessary.
Baking your own sourdough bread is not difficult, but it does take time. This slow process is what allows the carbohydrates to break down, so your stomach doesn't have to do all that work!
I haven't actually calculated before how much you can save by baking your own bread, but many breads now cost more than 10 euros per kilo. You can get some for less and I never usually bought the most expensive breads, except this malted rye specialty bread that DD likes and it's not available as a cheaper version. (I could make my own though!) But let's say that you eat a variety of breads from the cheapest ones to the more expensive ones, and spend 8 euros per kilo on average. You can buy a kilo of organic flour for around two euros at the cheapest. You can choose to support a smaller brand if you want to make sure the farmer gets more profit out of the sale, and spend a bit more. Of course, non-organic would be cheaper still. When I buy bread from the store, I buy non-organic, as there are lots more varieties available and the price isn't as ridiculous, but when I bake, I buy organic flour.
Flour price has of course gone up a lot too, but out of a kilo of flour you get more than a kilo of bread, obviously, since you put water in it too. For sourdough bread, you literally only need water, flour and a bit of salt, that's it. Well, you need the starter, but you can make the starter yourself from just flour and water, so it has the same ingredients. So, let's say you can get 1,5 kilos of bread out of a kilo of flour. So for 8 euros you would get six kilos of bread instead of one! That is a significant difference and if you have a large family that eats a lot of bread, it might be worthwhile to start baking. Also, if you bake with sourdough, it is healthier that a bread baked with yeast.
Using non-organic flour that costs about 1 euro per kilo, you would get 12 kilos of bread instead of one!
Then you spend a little on electricity to bake it, but in cold weather that also benefits you with additional heat. Or if you have a wood fired oven and a source of free wood, then that doesn't cost you anything extra. My wood stove technically has an oven, but due to how it is connected to the chimney, the oven part doesn't get hot enough for baking. I can use the stove just fine, and the oven could be used to warm up foods, but sadly no baking there. I could bake in the fireplace though, in a pinch!
Have you tried making sourdough bread?
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