[treerock]

I'm curious if anyone has numbers on how much a homemade sourdough loaf costs on average. My experience is that flour is quite expensive (and currently not available in UK shops).

I've also noticed a spike in electricity costs since we've started baking regularly. (Difficult to calculate exactly)

My guess is that baking your own is a bit cheaper than going to some artisanal baker, but a lot more expensive than a standard load.

[ghaff]

I'm pretty sure you would be correct.

The cost (assuming you have at least a minimal amount of equipment--including an oven obviously) is basically the flour (which, as you say, can be hard to find right now).

A 5 pound bag of flour is normally around $4-$5 in the US, and a large boule (5 cups of flour) takes about 600 grams (~1.5 pounds) of flour, so maybe $1.50. The other ingredients in a basic loaf are negligible and the electricity is about 30 cents at a typical US price (ballpark of 10 cents per KWh).

Call it about $2 all together. So, yes, less than an artisanal loaf but maybe a bit more than cheap supermarket bread (though that's a larger loaf as well.)

[rebuilder]

Is this some kind of specialist flour? 1 USD per pound seems high.

[ghaff]

King Arthur flour (one of the big national brands) at Walmart in 5 pound bags. They probably have their own brand which is cheaper.

[maxerickson]

Great Value flour here lists for ~$0.22 a pound in a 5 pound bag. Website says they are out of stock though.

(Great Value is the Walmart store brand)

[0xffff2]

King Arthur is absurdly expensive. I'd say Gold Medal is a much better benchmark and it's usually about half the price.

[masonic]

Grocery Outlet's store brand of bread has been $1.59 a loaf for a long time. White or whole wheat.

[maxerickson]

Home ovens use something similar to 2KW to run for an hour.

(it's gonna vary between models and temperatures and so on, I think 2KW is good enough for the sake of discussion)

So from there, 5KW or so is probably a good upper limit for a bread cooking cycle (it's probably less than that). Here that's ~$0.50, and then small retail packages of flour are ~$0.50 a pound. $0.25 for yeast, and trivial amounts of salt/sugar.

So (here) 2 large loaves of bread is less than $2 of ingredients and energy.

Flour is out of stock on the online store I just checked here also.

[ohiovr]

For ultimate economy it is possible to filter whole grains you can find at a feed company and carefully grind it into flour with automatic means. You just gotta be careful not to ruin the grain mill. I've made bread using a waffle iron. Actually english muffins can be made with a grill. Quite good fresh!

[dehrmann]

> My experience is that flour is quite expensive

My mom loves making baked goods. At some point, she switched to buying 5+ lbs. bags of flour. It turns out that flour bags from 1-25 lbs. are priced way closer than you'd expect.

[rebuilder]

Approximately 0.35 EUR per loaf containing 250g flour, assuming you bake 3 loaves at once in an electric oven, and aren't considering the effects of the heat produced on your heating/cooling costs.