Driving costs south . . .

With the price of specialist store- and supermarket-bought breads rising, it’s worth considering the cost advantage of home baking.

Sure, there’s the enjoyment I get from the exercise – as well as the wonderful baking smells wafting through the house as a loaf reaches the end of its baking cycle – but I’ve also slashed the family bread bill dramatically.

Here in Australia, you can spend anywhere between $A4.50 and $A7 for a decent commercially made loaf. Even at the lower end of that scale your mob can be churning through as much as $A27 worth of bread a week (a loaf a day for, say, six days). It’s easy enough to do if you have 3-4 lunches to make daily, and one or more of you like toast for breakfast.

No doubt – like me – when you start out with a bread machine, you buy the commercial home-baking kits. But trust me . . . you won’t be saving much if you keep driving down that track. And there are still preservatives and other additives you should avoid.

But once you start scratch-building loaves, you should be able to drive the cost of even your most exotic creations down to as little as $A1.50 a loaf.

Although maths was never my strong suit (hence my career in writing and journalism!), I’m saving the Heininger posse about $A18 a week just on bread. Over a year, that’s almost $A1000 . . . or at least 20 family get-togethers at our favourite Vietnamese noodle bar.

Put this way, you can see there are better things to spend your dough on (doh!) than commercial bread!

Ingredients

You’ll find most of what you need – flours, yeast, improver, oats, seeds, oil, salt, etc. – on your supermarket shelves anyway. Specialist items like gluten flour are a bit harder to track down, but many health-food stores and mail-order suppliers stock it.

The trick is to buy as much as you can in the biggest bags possible – and to have vermin-proof, air-tight storage bins and containers in convenient spots not far from ‘baking central’. My next move is to buy, say, 30kg bags of flour (plain and wholemeal) and store this in resealable plastic bins on rollers under the stairs.

I buy at least 1kg of rolled oats and milk powder at a time, and larger 500gm bags of linseed/flax seeds and buckwheat. Not sure what's available in your country, but I also use Lowan improver (in 250gm bags) and Lowan instant dry yeast (in 280gm resealable containers).

My next trick is to visit a grocery wholesaler here in Sydney to see how much lower I can drop my costs.

Storage

You’ll find that if you store flour properly, it should keep for as much as six months. The trick is to use it all - or almost all - before buying more. And if you’re making even one loaf a day, over six days of the week (at 450gms of flour a loaf), you’ll churn through 30kg of flour in roughly 11 weeks.

Once opened, everything else I use goes into resealable containers, and is stored at a constant temperature in dark recesses of kitchen cupboards – with the exception of the yeast; I store its resealable container in another resealable plastic box in the fridge (got th keep the moisure out).

We’ve re-arranged the kitchen cupboards so I have easy access to everything – including the salt and oil (which has a pouring attachment on the bottle instead of its screw lid).

And I keep all my utensils – measuring spoons, cups, spatula and electronic scales - in the same drawer, along with the electric carving knife and blades. That way, nothing ever (seems) to go missing.

Hope this helps!