To think cooking from scratch is not always cheaper?

Portion size makes a big difference, what you probably served at home would be larger than a pre made supermarket version.

you have added ingredients that I believe would not be in a normal spaghetti bol (or at least any cook at home weekday recipe that I have seen), very nice of course buts it’s an unfair comparison.

pre made meals in my experience are usually larger in the carb portion than protein.

and at least with your home made version you know exactly what is in it. Check out the sugar quantity in any bought pre-made. It’s super cheap filler and there’s a doco about some where on sugar being used as filler.

I felt like I had bowels of soup the last time I had food poisoning.

That's like comparing apples and pears.

Jar of sauce some onion and mince would be comparable to a basic spag bol. Same meat with just tin tomato, tomato puree, a bit onion, garlic and carrot along with dried herbs. I'd estimate using 500g of mince beef, You will be looking at under £1 a portion.

I’m wondering the same thing.

Getting it in a restaurant near me (Oxfordshire) it’s £15.75 per person. For kids, around £8.00/8.50.

Ready meals are obviously cheaper, but many aren’t worth the price.

Ginmonkeyagain · 02/02/2025 17:03

If it cost £18 to make a beef ragu you are doing it wrong.
I made one yesterday (for 4) - beef mince, onion, garlic, carrot, celery, bay leaf, a red pepper, teaspoon of capers, tin of tomatoes, glass of red wine, beef stock. Simmer for an hour or two. I had everything apart from the beef mince already, but I reckon tne ingredients would have been about £6 max.
Mine costs about this too - i use mushrooms instead of peppers

I was thinking about your post today because I am making bolognaise from scratch today. Thank you for the tip to add some sundried tomatoes. I had some to use up and wouldn’t have thought about adding to this.

I think in terms of cooking from scratch it depends on your purpose how cheap / expensive things will be. I’ve worked out how much my bolognaise today will cost (without the pasta which will be another 50p ish and we don’t have garlic bread with ours today because I haven’t thought of it) and it’s about £9 with 750g of slightly cheaper mince but including all the herbs etc as you have. I have also added red lentils to make the meal more filling and go further. There is also a higher vegetable content than yours but I’ve used a chopper so they are tiny so the children will eat them.

I have cooked it from scratch so it will feed 3 adults and a child tonight. But this is a lot of bolognaise so I will make it in to the following also:

2 small lasagnes (one for mil and one for my auntie) and a lasagne for our freezer for 2 adults and a child;
1 large gnocchi bake which will have the bolognaise, gnocchi and cheese and will go in the freezer for next week again for 3 adults and a child;
then I will add some chilli, cumin and 3 tins of various beans to the left over sauce which we will have as
chilli with rice
chilli and mac cheese mix
plus with some salad and salsa on some tortillas cut like nachos because we have some broken tortillas in the freezer to use up.

We won’t eat these meals all back to back but they will be portioned up and labelled ready for additional ingredients and frozen or otherwise stored etc ahead of us eating them.

People have different reasons for cooking from scratch. It could be for health reasons / allergies / wanting to avoid certain things or it could be to save money. It isn’t mutually exclusive.

I find making a bolognaise is a ‘starter’ recipe to go to other things. So we can eat home made from scratch food but also save time and money. Like anything in life it is what you make of it.

I used to mix Quorn into a meat bolognese and it tasted OK, but it's the texture of the Quorn that we don't like, it breaks into tiny pieces and we prefer the slightly bigger minced bits. I suppose it's down to what you're used to eating really.

@Jeezitneverends It does push the flavour of the wine, garlic and herbs into the meat really well, though you may need less liquid overall. I've only started doing it in the pressure cooker recently and really notice the difference, the colour and flavour seem fresher than if it is done in a slow cooker too. I only cook it for 4-6 minutes under pressure and sometimes have to reduce it a little if it's too sloppy. It's even better the next day.

To think cooking from scratch is not always cheaper?

It’s not always cheaper but it can be cheaper. You’ve said you can afford to do it the way you do and you like the taste better so if you’re happy to pay over £21 for ingredients for one meal then that’s ok. You can’t really question it though when you’re going all out on it and using what some would see as luxury items. Those people that want to make it from scratch to save money will usually have herbs, stock cubes etc already in. So just a few items such as meat and tin of tomatoes or something won’t cost to much to get and make a meal

Exactly @Cookiesandcandies when comparing like with like for taste and quality, it's far cheaper to cook from scratch.

If you're wanting to objectively compare home made food with ready made, you need to price it against Cook, Charlie Bighams or independent delis, not supermarket value/standard level equivalents.

You're not comparing like for like. Of course you could go even grander than that, spend £20 on a bottle of red to put in it, use only the most expensive free range steak from the butchers and mince it yourself, add a load of gold flakes to the top, and spend £60! or even £100! But when people say it's cheaper to make stuff from scratch they mean if you make an effort to use cheaper ingredients 😂If you can afford to spend £18 on a spag bol then the advice isn't really aimed at you. It's aimed at people who could really do with saving that extra 50p.

My spag bol (serves 6):

500g of minced beef: £5.50
a pack of dried pasta: £1
grated cheese £1

Those are all things you'd buy whether you used a jar from Aldi or make your own sauce. Same with garlic bread, so don't include that in the price.

For the sauce:
2 tins of the cheapest tinned tomatoes: 66p
dash of Worcester sauce: 10p
squirt of tomato puree: 30p
dash of red wine vinegar (we only crack the red wine out for special occasions): 20p
1 carrot: 7p
3 pinches of various herbs: 15p
onion: 12p
garlic: 15p

comes to £1.75.

For 6 people you'd need 2 jars of Aldi sauce, so £1.50.

OK so it's 25p dearer for me to make it from scratch. But it is nicer and healthier. If I was really broke I could ditch the red wine vinegar and two of the herbs, and just use oregano, and save myself 30p. Mine also has fresh veg in it.

Also Spag bol is just one meal, and probably the very cheapest that you can find in the supermarket. I don't think you can get jars of curry sauce that cheap, or chilli con carne sauce, or casserole sauce etc. So perhaps in that one, specific instance it's almost as cheap to buy ready made, but for the rest of your meals I don't think it is.

I’ve never done it in the pressure cooker, usually the slow cooker, but I’ll maybe give that a try😊

You've disproven your own point.

You can make it as expensive as you want when home cooking- and you're choosing to do so.

Doesn't mean that's the only way.

"How can people be expected to home cook nutritious meals when pancetta, parmigiano and garlic bread is so expensive wahhh"

Come on now.

Lots of people are sensitive to quorn products- my stomach is always in bits. I don't eat meat though, and am thankfully fine with lentils/beans/pulses/tofu etc. I disagree people wouldn't know though unless the sauce was wild rich.

I am vegetarian, so cook my bolognaise with quorn. My DS didn't really like bolognese much.

Then I cooked up a meaty one at some point (in exactly the same way as my quorn one, but with meat). He could not get enough of it, he wanted a bowl just of sauce at the end, he couldn't understand why he hadn't liked it in the past, what had I done differently etc.

I love quorn, but it would appear that some people can very much taste the difference 😂

Now I have to make both!

Soya/Quorn mince even cheaper, better for you and the planet and I guarantee nobody would be able to tell the difference if you don’t tell them. Delicious

I use a pressure cooker and, if I have time, cook it the day before to give the flavour time to develop. You'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference I think.

Sorry, my last post was in response to @RaspberryRipple2

I agree, I have used lentils in the past and like them. I now use half low fat beef and half low fat pork mince which gives a lovely juicy sauce. I also use several tins of Mutti "polpa" tomatoes which I buy when on offer, with 150ml or so of wine. I cook in a pressure cooker so I think that I end up with more sauce as there is less evapouration. Around a kg of mince gives me a lot of sauce, certainly enough for two meals for 3 adults and two children, with perhaps some left for the freezer. If you look at a "real" Italian pasta dish you're likely to see more tomato sauce and pasta with less meat in the dish compared to an English version.
I certainly wouldn't use the sun dried tomatoes that the OP uses, a waste of money when the Mutti tomato puree is so good. And I don't use expensive pancetta, parmesan shavings or bought garlic bread. The amount of herbs and seasoning used is minimal and costs almost nothing as I have them in the house anyway.
Maybe if you don't cook regularly from scratch it would cost you more to stock up on what you need, but they would last you for ages.

A slow cooker would be so much cheaper. I use a pressure cooker and get exactly the same result with less than 10 minutes cooking.

Tesco have Italian meals on offer at 3 for £8, so £16 to feed 6. If you add on bread, salad and possibly some Parmesan to shave over the top then easily more than £18. Plus the quality of the home made £18 bolognaise will be incomparably better than a ready meal, plus no additives.

Or Finest are on offer at 2 for £8, so £24 for 6 people which is probably closer in quality to the dish OP is making.

When I make my own spag bol the only ingredients I use that I wouldn’t with a jar is onion, garlic, tinned tomatoes, tom puree, stock and herbs. Most of those I have in the store cupboard, so wouldn’t be more expensive. Not sure how your bolognaise sauce ended up so expensive.

I suppose that's what happens when you get your micro herbs delivered from Fortnum and Mason.