To think cooking from scratch is not always cheaper?

A whole jar of sundried tomatoes? Don’t think that’s necessary! (I’m a good cook and make a delicious bolognaise). Also that’s a lot of Parmesan for one meal - a whole piece of Parmesan costs around £3 and you’d only use a quarter for six generous gratings. How much olive oil are you using for it to cost 75p - must be loads! I’m guessing people weren’t expecting the £2.50 cost of cheesy garlic bread to be included, either.
I do agree with you that cooking from scratch costs more, though.

The red wine stock pot is ridiculous

Buy a bottle of red & pour it into ice cube trays.

Use a few of the frozen cubes when you need to add wine to a recipe.

Your recipe isn't a fair comparison either a cheap ready meal or a value jar of sauce.

Bolognese is one of the cheapest family meals there is, but I don't use wine or pancetta or sun-dried tomatoes. I'd use a carrot, onion, garlic, stock, mince, tinned tomatoes, puree and pasta. Apart from the mince it's pennies.
It can stretch too, doing a lasagne and a chilli with the leftovers.

Obviously not, but 90 minutes on a very low heat on an induction hob is going to cost much less than 3.5 hours in the oven.

It depends what you make.
I can make a 4-6-helping vat of tomato soup for about £3 (3 cheap tins of tomatoes, an onion or 2, couple of stock cubes, mixed herbs, bay leaf from the garden, splash of leftover wine, couple of cloves of garlic, S&P; if I've got some limp-looking celery or a dying carrot, that goes in as well). Pre-made fresh soup is about £2.20 for about a third the amount.

And when it comes to baking, yes, a packet of supermarket custard creams is 60p, whereas the butter alone for home-made shortbread would cost more than that. But if you want to buy all-butter shortbread with no preservatives, you're looking at shelling out £1 for 200gm. Almost twice that weight cooked at home will cost you maybe £1.30 including the fuel.

I often make my own bread (I'm lucky, I have the time). Two 1lb loaves cost me about £1.30 to make including fuel - 70p each. A similar loaf in the shops, with no palm oil etc in it, costs about £2.50.

I love a competitive bolognaise thread!

I slow cook mine, because I have an Aga, and the general rule is that if it needs longer than about 15 minutes simmering to put it in an oven. For those saying there is no point simmering for hours, the flavours that develop after low and slow cooking are so much more intense and complex than 40 minutes sitting on a hob top. It is so worth that time, regardless of the specifics of anyone's personal recipe.

wow
I cook almost everything (except bread) from scratch.
I do my weekly shop from Ocado, with rarely more than 1 loaf of bread brought to "top up" in between
(milk delivered every other day from milk man)
I get my weekly shop for 4 people (2 adults and 2 teenagers who eat adult portions) for about £100 / week.
I have a herb garden, and we grow fruit / veg but at the moment I only have cabbage and kale to pick.
There is no way I could feed my family decent unprocessed food for less than it costs me to cook it myself in my kitchen

A bolognese for me
5% mince £2.63 (half of a 750g pack, plenty for 4)
tinned toms 50p
garlic 20p
Onion 10p
a couple of carrots 20p
stick of celery 10p
M&S spaghetti 250g 34p
salt and pepper <1p
splosh of vinegar 2p
herbs from garden free
= £4.10 / give or take £1ish /portion

I can't seem to make jam cheaper than buying jam. Even when I pick my blackberries for free

I'm also not convinced I can make biscuits as cheap as a pack of malted milk.

Everyone on here seems to get their fuel free. Do you cook over an open fire with logs gathered from the local woods?

3.5 hours in the oven. Never heard of bolognese being cooked in an oven and for that long. Wow!

Mmm. I don't assume it will be necessarily cheaper, but that scratch cooking allows me to make the savings where I want to.

So I would use quality beef, but I would not use expensive tomatoes or fanny around making my own tomato puree.

I'd not bother with the wine (don't like it), will use lazy garlic/garlic puree if we already have it (varies as to whether wehave fresh garlic, i only buy it to do roasted garlic) or sling in roasted garlic I've made myself if we have that.

I will buy cheap pasta because I don't mind about that, but would rather go without cheese if I couldn't afford expensive cheese.

I can also pad out the meat with more veg if I want to.

So it can be as posh or as budget as I like, and the corner cutting is done where I am comfortable with that and then I am not risking horse bolognese or nasty gristley cheap meat, or a super sugary salty sauce designed to trick the consumer into not noticing a lack of meat/nasty meat.

If i go all out for super posh, then yes its going to be more expensive, of course it is!

I cook from scratch because I think it's healthier, well for us anyway, because I throw in extra veg to almost anything. Try to do the thirty fruit, veg, etc thingy. Also I half most things and put half in the freezer. I think it's cheaper too but really resent the time it takes tbh.

@LikeWhoUsesTypewritersAnyway - yellow stickers are not time limited! My local stores have reductions from early in the morning through to closing. They are not just reducing stuff 30 minutes before close. I have everyone in this house trained to always make a bee line for the reduced shelf.

Well of course it’s not always cheaper. It depends on what you cook and how you cook it. As any fool could work out.

Why are you putting a Bolognese in the oven? Surely it just goes on the hob. I buy the 5 percent fat mince from Lidl. It cost £3 something a pack. So if 2 pack would be £7. That would make at least 8 portions. Tins of tomatoes are cheap. A squirt of garlic paste, herbs fresh basil and tomato purée. £10 maximum. Then spaghetti.

You're not comparing like with like. The mass-produced stuff will have all sorts of unhealthy ingredients (like emulsifiers, additives, thickeners, sugar etc) to pad it out or make it cheaper. Yours will be much better nutritionally. (But I'm sure yours doesn't need to be THAT expensive.)

And yet you're making nonsensical and faux comparisons.

People who have no choice but to pay 75p for tomato sauce are not simultaneously spending on pre-grated parmesan or diced pancetta.

Well that's all very well if you have easy access to a store, and can be there near closing time when they're putting yellow stickers on them/selling stuff cheap.

Not everyone has the good fortune to be able to get to the shops just before they close.

We aren’t on Dragons’ Den.

Totally agree, but nevertheless. And dog and cat hairs. I mean the absence thereof.

Exactly. The OP is making a meaningless comparison.

Family of 5 + 1 extra portion to take away, so 6 people. That would be very small portions for everyone. Yours came to £15, only 3 quid less than the OPs (you said £18.99, sorry maybe I've missed an update but she said £18 I thought) which could account for 1 extra ingredient or some garlic bread to accompany the meal.

I recently made apple crumble and with the cost of the Bramleys butter, sugar and flour a ready made one was cheaper.

Not the point of the thread but at our old house we had several apple trees including a huge mature Bramley that produced literally hundreds of apples every year. Went shopping recently with DH and his face when he saw what each one of them would have sold for!

This. ^ Some people think they are much better cooks than they are! 😬

Surely you know perfectly well that the ragu you're making is unnecessarily expensive and full of premium ingredients, and therefore isn't in any way equivalent to a ready meal? This is a very weird post.