Bread for Bread

[What does bread have to do with polygamy? Nothing special. Consider this an interlude, if you like.]

Can you make bread more cheaply at home than you can buy at the supermarket? I decided to find out.

Now before you say, “it’s not about the cost”, I admit there’s something deeply satisfying about baking bread-- if you have the six hours or so to hang around the kitchen. There’s nothing like the aroma and taste of freshly baked bread. But how much ”bread” does it cost to make bread?

Consider a loaf of “basic bread”. By this, I mean the traditional four ingredient bread—flour, yeast, sugar, and salt. The prototypical ingredient list for basic bread looks something like this:

· 3 cups of flour
· 1 package of yeast
· Some sugar and salt and water

Flour is a commodity which, like crude oil, changes price from week to week. Last week, a 50 pound bag of ConAgra flour from CostCo cost $22. This week, a 10 pound bag of all purpose flour from a local supermarket cost $5. That’s about 50 cents a pound, whether you buy it in bulk or in smaller quantities.

A cup of flour weighs 4.5 ounces, so one loaf of basic bread uses ((3 x 4.5)/16) x .50 = 43 cents worth of flour. That doesn’t sound very expensive, does it?

Would it surprise you to know that the most costly ingredient in basic bread is the yeast? One loaf of bread requires one packet of yeast. One packet of Fleischmann’s yeast costs about 90 cents, or you can buy Red Star yeast for about 70 cents a packet. The yeast in a loaf of bread costs twice as much as the flour! It’s like those costly little ink cartridges you buy for your inexpensive printer.

Ok, so you can make a loaf of basic bread for about $1.20. How does that compare to what you find in a supermarket?

You won’t find anything labeled “basic bread” on the shelves. The closest you’ll get to basic bread is probably a flute of French bread. One pound of flour makes one "standard" loaf of bread or two flutes of French bread. Our supermarket sells a one pound flute of French bread for $2 (feeds eight). You could make it at home for about $1.50.

Is this typical? Today’s Seattle Times gives a national average price for a loaf of bread as $1.89.

No matter how you slice it, you really can’t save money by baking bread yourself. Did I mention brushing the top of the bread with a pat of butter (10 cents) or making white bread with a cup of milk (25 cents)? But you might be able to beat the price of specialty bread, especially if you can find something to compare with, say, grandma’s anchovy coconut bread surprise.

Well, what about that heavenly aroma? You can freshen a loaf of store-bought (or frozen) bread by wrapping it in aluminum foil (or putting it in a pot with a lid) and sticking it in a warming oven for ten minutes or so. This approximates the “freshly baked” experience, if you have a good imagination, and are very hungry.

If you really want to make cheap bread, you’ll have to deal with the cost of yeast. Here’re some suggestions—

· Try a soda bread, quickbread, or other unleavened bread (no yeast).
· Create or borrow a sourdough starter (grow the yeast) and make sourdough bread.

A side benefit of having a good sourdough starter is that you can Xerox a good sourdough recipe and share both the recipe and the ever- replenished starter with friends. Like a pregnant cat, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.