A treatise on bread and the economics of home breadmaking: It's all about the Benjamins, baby

Bread is deceptively simple in many ways. It is, at its heart, a simple preparation of ground and cooked grain; like gruel, but thicker. You don't see anybody getting excited about gruel. I'm the kind of person who would like to be excited about gruel, and I still find it a difficult proposition. Bread, on the other hand, is very easy to like. At its best, bread is chewy, flavorful, addictive. Undoubtedly, an important aspect of the appeal of bread is the partial fermentation of the dough by yeast, which produces nice flavors. This too is a kind of marvel though, as anyone who has drunk bad home-brewed beer can attest. Bread provides the perfect backdrop to so much food, adding to it without overpowering it. Bread also comes in such a variety of forms: quickbreads, yeast-breads or flatbreads; pan-baked, oven-baked, fried or steamed; wheat, rye, corn, and whatever else may be at hand.

No matter the form it takes, however, the most essential aspect of bread is it's ability to keep humans fed. Actually, the ability to keep humans fed is an essential aspect of cereal grains in general.... bread does more: it keeps humans fed and happy. It contains whatever quality it is that turns sustenance into prosperity. It is one of the first luxuries that people will buy when they have spending money. And when food prices go up, its the price of bread that really brings hunger to the door.

Anyway, these musings were spawned by my deciding to look and see what bread cost at the store. It was $3.19 for a 1.5 pound loaf of mid-range whole wheat bread. I had no idea, as I've been baking bread for us, every week, for the last 4 years now. I do it because the bread I produce at home is far superior to the stuff from the store. I've always suspected it was an economical endeavor as well, but I've never really sharpened my pencil until today.

Costs of bread making per week (three 1.3 pound loaves):

Unbleached white flour: 2 pounds from a 50 pound bag...... $0.60
Yeast: 1 T from a large jar of dry yeast................................$0.33
Salt: 2 T Iodized salt........................................................... $0.01
Electricity:  2 kwh to run electric oven at $0.14 per kwh
                 .1kwh to run well pump and mixer......................$0.26
Kitchen Aid mixer: depreciation of 1/1000th of value............$0.35
My time..............................................................................20 min

The total comes to $1.20 per week for expenses, or $62.57 per year. Compare this to $442 if the same amount of bread were purchased at the store. To look at it another way, the savings from this industry amounts to my being paid $22 per hour to do something I like to do. This calculation does not take into account the superior product produced at home.