Getting started with bread baking on a budget

Frugal strategies for budget-friendly baking

Be adaptable
Don’t get fixated on baking with this or that heritage grain. Look at which grains and flours are most affordable where you live, and work with that. Wheat gets a lot of negative attention, but wheat can be a nourishing food for many people if it is organic and made into sourdough bread.

Buy in bulk
Buying directly from farmers and distributors in large bags can bring a lot of savings. Buying a 20 to 25kg or 50 pound bag is usually the best value. Whole unmilled grain will keep for many years in buckets or barrels, and whole grain flours can keep for several weeks if they are in a cool part of the house.

A grain mill can make sense if you bake a lot.
I save roughly $2 per kilo (or $1 per pound) by milling my own grain. In one year of milling enough flour for my family, I am saving enough money to nearly pay for two grain mills! Many grain mills come with a 12 year warranty, and in 12 years of milling even a small household is likely have saved enough in flour costs to justify the grain mill. Freshly milled flour is more nutritious and has more flavour than old flour too.

Look at what homemade bread can replace
The most obvious thing to replace is store-bought bread: replacing this with homemade will save money and bring better nutrition, but we can go beyond that and find ways to make other meals cheaper by using homemade bread instead of more expensive foods.

Once upon a time I used to bake a lot of sweet foods and treats, at that time I used to also wonder where all our money disappeared to. These days I bake a lot of bread, we eat a lot of bread, and I might make a dessert or sweet treat every week or two.

Bread served with butter has better nutritional value than sweet foods, and is a lot cheaper and faster to make. Toast with some jam or honey can be enough to satisfy a sweet tooth, and works out to be a lot cheaper than baking a cake. The same goes for breakfast cereals and snack foods, which can be very expensive to buy: we just don’t buy or make these things, but we always have homemade bread on hand.

Make your staple bread recipes be lean breads
I bake three or four loaves a day of simple bread that is made from just flour, water, sourdough starter, and salt. If I were instead to make sandwich bread, brioche, or other breads enriched with fat, sweeteners or eggs every day, the cost of my bread would increase massively. The lean breads I make are wonderfully tasty, can still be used for sandwiches, and are nutritious, affordable, and sugar-free.

Don’t rush out and buy all the gear that people say you need to buy
A bowl and a tea towel works just as well as an expensive bread proofing basket. Loaf tin breads can be just as tasty as dutch oven breads. You can still produce good bread without a baking stone or a way to steam the oven. Start with what you have, figure out what you like to bake, and slowly get the gear over time to bake in the way that best suits you.

Sourdough is cheaper than yeast, and it doesn’t have to taste sour
Yeast is something that needs to be purchased again and again, but your own sourdough starter can be kept alive at home, at no more cost than a bit of flour. There are many techniques and recipes around, some are designed to get a lot of sour flavour, others designed to have less: experiment and see which recipes you like the taste of. There are ways of managing a sourdough starter that create no waste, so that you can completely remove any yeast costs from your food budget.

Bread can be the cornerstone of your kitchen: toast for breakfast, bread on the side of a meal, a slice of bread served with soup or stew to make the meal more filling. There are ways to make great bread on a budget, and ways to make bread in a busy life. In a few days time I’ll be sharing my strategy of making great sourdough bread with minimal hands-on time.