Hello Bakers,
Ingredient prices are an issue for many of us. And I am on a mission to help you keep on baking.
After all the bakers who came before - baked more in hard times - it’s always cheaper to bake than to buy.
And when we bake we control the ingredients.
According to a poll, I put up on Instagram a few weeks ago - asking about inflation and your baking.
Some of you reported you were baking less, some were baking more simply and some of you had stopped baking. And that made me so sad.
So let’s figure it out - baking can be far less expensive the buying but we have to be organized and have a plan.
And it won’t be boring or repetitive, I promise. We can work on focus on finesse, making each batch more perfect than the last.
1. Bake and freeze as part of your meal planning. Everyday bakes like bagels, hamburger buns, pizza dough and whole wheat bread can be made ahead and frozen. This is much more.
2. Keep you baker’s pantry organized and stocked to your baking level. What? What do I mean - stock to the amount you are baking. Make sure you have what you need complete your baking. Having to run out for ingredients is not only a buzzkill but a potential bakekill.
Watch buying in super bulk if you are not going to bake your way through it.
3. Bake it - don’t buy it. The breads and baked goods you do buy can be made by you. A bag of supermarket bagels runs about $4.99 when they aren’t on sale. My weekly batch runs me about .80 cents. (I’ll be going over the math in future posts). And I have other examples as well.
4. This is related to tip one but know what is in your refrigerator and freezer. Try to keep both as organized as possible. Keep a running list on the side of the refrigerator - a small magnetic whiteboard works. This way things will get used up quickly and have to be thrown out or composted later. And I never ever buy bread crumbs - every scrap or heel of bread gets ground up and added to the bread crumb collection.
Did you know that leftover croissants make amazing breadcrumbs?
5. If you have a sourdough starter and you aren’t baking with it all the time, scale it back to a small amount - this will save on flour.
6. Store brands are fine - with the exception of flour. I tested and tested and tested. Everything came out ok. There is one exception, read on.Sugars of all types, shortening, butter and eggs - buying the store brands will save you money. The one ingredient I never buy the store brand version of is flour. It is always bleached, as bleaching lengthens its shelf life. In making doughs, the bleaching process is a problem - it affects the gluten strands - making them stringy and hyper elastic. So this is where I stick to King Arthur or Gold Medal - make sure the bag says UNBLEACHED - it’s worth it and we are already saving money on ingredients that work fine as store brands. The only time we want bleached flour is cake flour. The bleaching process helps with sugar absorption.
Final quick tips:
7. Look for recipes that use oil not butter.
8. Skip the posh frostings that involve egg whites, meringue and butter.
9. Use milk powder in place of liquid milk - ditto buttermilk powder. - more on this in future posts.
10. Weave your family and household bakes into your meal prep - many doughs will wait patiently in the refrigerator for you. Like the .80 cent batch of bagels that are cold fermenting in the refrigerator right now.
Stay tuned - more money saving tips, tricks and recipes coming soon.