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.
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.
I did the math a little bit ago because I was baking a lot of bread, and I think depending on the bread it was actually cheaper to buy the same kind of loaf baked in my grocery store than to buy the equivalent ingredients. This was a Publix though which at least in my area are on the more expensive end and they didn’t have store brand bread flour so I had to go with a fancy brand.
I think, but cannot be certain, that is includes some energy cost.
It really is excellent.
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.
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.
It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.
In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn't have to provide so it's basically free: you'd use that energy anyway.
Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.
I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it's way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.
It really depends on your energy source and your appliance, but the cost to run something like an oven for an hour is pretty negligible, especially if it's a somewhat modern appliance.
Most newer over run somewhere around 2-3,000 kwh, which nationwide averages to around .30 to .50 cents an hour.
The real cost of making food at home really just depends on how much you value your own labour/free time, and how much of a chore cooking is for you.
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 think I did napkin math once that included cost of labour, and surprise surprise, mass production works. Just the energy is a good point too, though.
It sounds like energy pretty cheap right now. But, it's also artificially cheap unless you have a lot of renewables on your grid, and somebody somewhere is going to pay for those emissions.
I didn't do the math for bread - maybe I should reconsider that one, per the other users here.
I'm not sure where you are, but I think homemade bread is not as bad for you as mass produced.
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.
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.
