Hello lovely readers I need your advice; I’d love to hear your thoughts on bread making.
A little bit of background: our family eats approximately 4 loaves a week and I buy the multi seed loaf that costs approximately £1.50 when it’s not on offer; bread {just loaves} is therefore costing about £25 a month.
I’d love to know if making your own bread is more cost efficient and if so, how you make it? Do you use a bread maker or do you make it by hand?
PS. I’d also love to know if it’s easy, as I’m no Delia Smith 
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
We make our own bread with a breadmaker, but I’m afraid I have no idea about cost per loaf because we do it fairly infrequently, maybe once a week if that.
The good thing about a breadmaker is the other stuff you can make in it. For us, we love to make our own pizzas so we do pizza bases at least once a week. Just bung a bit of cheese and tomato sauce on the top, along with a few toppings and it’s a really cheap (and fun) meal.
If you do get through that much bread a week and were thinking about getting a breadmaker, I’d think about getting a larger capacity one. The loaves from ours come out fairly modestly sized!
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i don’t have a breadmaker, so can’t vouch for it, but going by those friends of mine that do, it seems a really good and economical way of making bread, particularly if you eat lots of it. I intend to get one as soon as myself and my other half can afford to move somewhere with a smidgen more storage space.
another thing worth considering is waitrose. most of their bread is hideously expensive, but in my branch at least, if you show up at around half an hour before closing time, all that day’s bread is reduced with gorgeous loaves for around 50p, which i tend to stockpile and freeze.
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I figure I save about $1 a loaf making my own bread, although that’s not why I do it. I bake my own bread because it’s fun and because I get better bread.
I bake sourdough bread, so I don’t have to buy yeast. (That’s probably the main source of savings.) In fact, we’ve been doing it long enough and reliably enough that we don’t even have dry yeast on hand any more—we just always use the sourdough starter if we need yeast for something.
I wrote a post on baking your own bread:
http://www.wisebread.com/how-to-bake-sourdough-bread-and-save-a-buck-on-every-loaf
The whole theme of that post is that baking bread is easy. It doesn’t even take much time hands-on with the dough: maybe 30 or 40 minutes a week. But it does require that you be available to do the next step when it’s time to go on, so that 30 or 40 minutes is spread out over several hours. That can be tough for someone who works a regular job.
I bake bread by hand. I had a bread machine but it had been so long since we used it, I finally gave it away.
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I’m a convert! I make bread in the cooler months to fill the oven up. I never had much luck with it until I discovered Richard Bertinet’s book ‘Dough’. He has an unusual method of kneading a very wet dough, which is actually more like folding. The book comes with a DVD that shows his methods and lots of step by step pictures. We use an regular (though not particularly reliable) electric oven and get good results.
Skillet breads, pancakes and oatcakes are definitely the way forward in summer. Elizabeth David’s ‘English Bread and Yeast Cookery’ has lots of delicious regional specialities for these and regular baked breads.
In my opinion the quality of bought bread will never match a homemade bread once you have practised a few times. You can then buy sacks of flour and blocks of yeast, which will save money.
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I have been making my own bread for over a year now. I started with the “no-knead” method and loved it. I work from home so I can easily fit in the different stages around my work. It saves us money as a trip to the bakery (or any store selling bread) is a 45 minute round trip – but I have not costed the actual loaf. I am thinking about getting a bread machine for the summer months to keep the kitchen cool.
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I don’t make my own bread, but I heard that no knead bread is pretty darn good!
However, I am thinking of making some pretzels with my daughter.
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Wow lots of information; thank you. I have a lot to learn!
I think I may start with ‘no knead bread’, see how it goes and then perhaps buy a bread maker…
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Hi Laura,
I started making my own bread about 2 months ago. I use a breadmaker and have not purchased any bread from the supermarket since.
I love it. It only takes about 10 minutes to prepare, and then there is the lovely smell of bed baking!
I now make white, wholemeal, and sunflower and linseed, and banana and walnut bread.
It costs between a third to a half of what it costs for a similar loaf to purchase. And it tastes so much better!
Life is too short to be eating supermarket bought bread…….
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