One example is bread. I was baking bread the other day, and obviously the cost of the ingredients I put in the loaf are less than the cost of buying a loaf at the supermarket, but that doesn’t include the cost of putting the oven on.
Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?
I know that everyone’s energy costs are different so it’s not possible for someone to do the calculations for you, but I’ve never bothered to do them for my own case because bills I get from the energy company just tell me how much I owe them for the month, not “you put the oven on for 30 minutes on the 17th of June and that cost you X”. It sounds like a headache to try calculate how much I pay for energy per meal. But if someone else has done that calculation for themselves I’d be interested to read it and see how it works out. My intuition is that, in general, it’s cheaper to make things yourself (e.g. bread or beans like above), but I couldn’t say that for sure without calculating, which as I said seems like it would be a pain in the ass.
On the dry beans vs canned beans issue, I am firmly in the “it depends” camp. If you don’t plan your meals ahead of time, then dry beans become difficult to cook as you need to soak them overnight and take much longer to cook. The price of dry beans can be significantly cheaper, but strangely, not so much at a normal grocery store. I found that buying dried beans in bulk or in large bags is wildly cheaper, but most standard grocery stores (in the US) don’t offer them like that so your savings are minimal and don’t justify the the extra prep to me.
I don’t have a calculation to back it up, but I’m inclined to believe store bought will always have a cheaper production cost. Your can of beans wasn’t made by one person per one can of beans at a time. It is done in a factory producing millions of cans. That kind of industrial process will always be cheaper. It’s designed to be that way. Beans can be bought wholesale below the cost available to you. And with that operation at scale it will undoubtedly be more energy efficient per can of beans. The consumer cost is something else. You will save money buying the raw ingredients and making your own beans rather than buying canned.
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Not really. Most appliances will give you the peak wattages, and that’s it. You’d need a sensor just for the appliance to know for sure.
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No, but I do try to keep prep and cleanup times to under 1 hour for breakfast and lunch combined and 1 hour for dinner.
Doing the calculation isn’t hard. It’s harder to know how much energy (be it electricity, gas, or whatever) you actually use. It also varies wildly with meals, as some need multiple stove tops (is that the right term?), possibly for varying lengths of time and/or the oven.
Please note that you can not really deduce the energy consumption from a power rating, as those usually are max values and not what it’ll actually need.
I have good enough energy monitoring that I can measure the usage (sort of), and having rather high electricity cost at around 0.40 €/kWh I do pay some attention to it. Running the oven for like an hour will be roughly 1€. Boiling water for pasta or something is probably more like 20 ct (includes cooking the pasta). Just using a lid actually helps a lot here if you make use of a lower power setting after reaching a boil and putting in the pasta.
It’s gonna have to be a very elaborate meal to break 3€. So while it does matter and add up, compared to buying fully prepared food from a restaurant, it isn’t that dramatic even with very high energy prices like these.
Cooking appliances use a lot of power, but they don’t run for whole days at a time, so the energy used also isn’t that dramatic. There’s a relatively recent video by technology connections that goes into detail, and might be of interest (link).
shrug i cook for myself because it generally tastes better than a good 80% of restaurants in my area, usually for less money. My finances are (thankfully) not so tight that I’m calculating how much it costs to keep an oven on for 30 minutes.
Always go homemade if you can. As much as possible. Premade shit is doo-doo for your body.
What’s wrong with, say, canned beans in water? I feel like you’re painting with too broad a brush there.
Canned beans in water isn’t really “premade food”, it’s just… an ingredient. It’s like saying a cucumber in plastic wrap is premade food. I wouldn’t say it is.
So canned beans in water (and cucumbers in plastic) do not count as premade food, and are thus fine. 👍
If you’ve ever done home canning, it’s kind of a huge process.
Look. What I’m saying is that ultra processed foods, or even processed foods, are not good for your body. If the food item is premade but not super processed, then take your chances I guess?
Not really, no.
Mainly because my mother-in-law has read/seen one too many horror stories on the state of eatery kitchens and insists on home cooked food 24/7.
To us, the electricity and gas bill is the cost of assurance that all our food is fresh, clean and healthy.
Something to consider is that prepared food will attract sales tax while food for cooking has either zero or reduced sales tax.
I’m not sure where you are, but I think homemade bread is not as bad for you as mass produced.
You also have to factor in the cost of your time. If it takes longer with one or the other that needs consideration too.
I kind disagree. I admit that e.g. growing your own veg will never be cheaper than buying it at a supermarket - it would make financial sense to spend a few more hours working instead, and just buy the veg, but that kind of misses the point. Gardening, cooking, DIY… they all have a certain satisfaction and self-sufficient pride to them that money can’t buy
Yes, you’re allowed having hobbies. Not everybody is looking to do it because they love it, though, and people plowing massive time into saving a few bucks with DIY projects is a very real thing. So, it’s probably good OP mentioned it.
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Also most people can’t throttle their work hours as needed like that. We cook during free time - free as in both speech and beer.
Yeah, that’s a factor that is fairly easy to calculate though. And for myself, I’m happy to spend more time within reason. I cook fairly high-effort meals if I think the effort (and time) will pay off. I was mostly asking about energy costs as that’s something I feel is quite hard to quantify properly. With time you know exactly how long it takes and can ask yourself whether or not it’s worth it for you.
I have been the home cook for 6 people for years on a tight budget so I do this a lot.
For me it really comes down to sales and effort. I really can’t beat a $.99 pound of pasta making it myself, I have tried. So i buy things like pasta, bread, tofu that I could make but the savings if any would be minimal especially after factoring in time.
Instead i use the time to make the more expensive dishes, things like pickled onions and slow roasted meats for my carnivores and compound butters and sauces and dressings. These elevate the meals and i’m able to make them far cheaper than I could buy them so the time spent ends up being worth it.
Sometimes there are sales that move all this math. My kroger just had a sale on salmon cakes, something my meat eaters love but i normally would make myself. But on sale for $2 each, i bought like 10 of them for the freezer they will be massive time savers in a pinch and will come in under what i could have prepared them for because of the sale!
The costs of running an oven for an hour is probably costing you like 40 cents and most of that is pre heating. Buy a bread maker or a toaster oven to make your loaves in and it will be less than half that. For most cooking, the electricity used is a rounding error.
Depending where you live, you may also need to heat your house anyway, so you really aren’t losing any energy at all by using the oven.
I figure more like 15 cents to bake a loaf of bread (gas oven, 15 minutes preheat, 30 minutes bake). Maybe another 20 cents if I rise it in the oven. In cold weather running the oven is essentially free, since the heat stays in the house and the furnace runs correspondingly less. In warm weather I just leave the kitchen door open to let the excess heat out.
Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?
Nowhere near, at least in a a pressure cooker. An electric pressure cooker uses 1KW when the heater is running, and you cook the beans for about 35 minutes. The heater doesn’t run the whole time but even if it did, that’s around 0.6 KWH at most. And you would normally do a bigger batch than you’d get in 1 can of beans. I have been wanting to measure the actual power usage sometime.
I don’t have a pressure cooker and cook beans on an electric stove, but I imagine it’s similar
On a stovetop you have to soak the beans overnight and then cook them for at least an hour, so energy usage might be higher, idk. OTOH the batch size compensates for a lot.
I very highly recommend getting a pressure cooker for this. Not only is it cheaper energywise and requires less planning ahead (don’t need to soak beans beforehand, much shorter cooking time), but you don’t have to keep tabs on a pot for hours. You just pour in the beans water and salt, press a button and come back later whenever you’re ready. Especially good for Garbanzo beans, which take a ridiculous amount of time to cook on a stovetop.
I tried with muffins. I have been really into muffins, but it was $7 for a 4 pack. So I bought some mix, eggs, oil, etc., and made my own. I think it came out to a little less than $2 per muffin, which is pretty similar to the original, not to mention I don’t have any dishes.
