Cost of Bread
How much does it cost to bake a loaf of bread? Or put another way, how much money might you save baking your own bread (which will taste better anyway)?
These figures will give you a ballpark idea. As always, I’m following my recipe.
- 425 grams of King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour: about 60 cents
- 8 grams of kosher salt: about 1.5 cents
- Sourdough culture and water (practically free)
- Preheat (my) oven with baking stone and dutch oven to 450°: 20 minutes at 2585 watts at 11.482 cents/kWh = 10 cents (I leave the baking stone in because I’m too lazy to take it out. Actually, it’s 6 unglazed clay tiles, but that’s another story)
- Heating element on during bake, including restoring heat lost when oven door open (yes, I watched the little light with a stopwatch): 10 minutes = 5 cents
Total cost: about 75 cents for a 1½ lb loaf of absolutely terrific artisan sourdough bread. You’ll pay 4–5 times that for bread that’s not nearly as good (nor as good for you) at the grocery store. So if you save say $2 per loaf you might be able to buy yourself a used iPod after a year. Then again, you might eat 4 times as much bread…
The take-home lesson here is never let anyone give you a guilt trip for baking bread. It costs under 25¢ in electricity, and even if you place a high price tag on pollution it is dwarfed by your air conditioner, refrigerator, etc. One very real issue is baking in the middle of the day in the summer, either making the A/C work that much harder or making you that much hotter. This is mostly a concern in places like Las Cruces where lunatics like myself live. Most of you will have air conditioners that can handle it just fine, though it would be interesting to figure what that cost would be (if you do so, let me know).
October 8th, 2007 at 12:36
In my case, you’ll eat 4x as much bread, and get 4x as fat from eating so much bread…
But I wouldn’t trade my bread maker for much.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:40
That may be true, Alex, although you’re much healthier than if you’d eaten 4x as much insipidbread from the store. :-)
Bread makers are probably even cheaper to run. They do put out better-than-insipid bread, but I do prefer the handmade stuff, for various reasons. It’s not really any more difficult than a bread machine, with the no-knead method.
October 9th, 2007 at 14:44
and then there’s those of us who really enjoy the kneading process. I’ve had a lot of fun making bread recently, and greatly enjoy actually kneading the bread. Some of the bread has not turned out exactly how i wanted (particularly since i started experimenting with 100% whole-wheat bread), but it’s definitely much better than store-bought
i do definitely eat more bread now than i did when i bought it from the store, though. there’s definitely something about bread straight out of the oven :)