For those of you who say it's cheaper to cook from scratch what are you making?

[womaninatightspot]

Having another look at the bills and trying to trim something off groceries. I do a lot of cooking from scratch already. I have chickens so the little food waste we have comes back to me in the form of eggs :)

Stuff that I do think is cheaper to make; pizza so long as you use cheapie mozzarella balls and not pre grated stuff. Pasta sauces. Soup.On balance it's cheaper to make your own meatballs/ burgers as you could buy them cheaper but the meat is so poor you lose a third to melting fat.

Anything pudding based it's often cheaper to buy from supermarkets. I made an apple and blueberry strudel yesterday and even although the fruit was free the cost of the ingredients was probably more/ the same as a frozen one from the supermarket. Cakes/ biscuits are very cheap premade.

I make my own jam with free/ cheap fruit but the cost of the sugar is more than the cheapest jam at the supermarket. I can make bread but at double the cost of a loaf of cheap white from the supermarket. It's not really a fair comparison because if you're trying to get your shopping bill down it's probably not awash with artisanal loaves.

I do wonder if I'm missing something though, so would love to hear what it is you make from scratch that's cheaper than premade.

I think when you're at the stage of buying cheap white bread versus home-made, or cheap burgers, it's unlikely there's masses more you can make at home that's all that much cheaper. As you say, you can buy things like bread very cheaply (though personally, I think the comparison between a loaf of cheap white and a home-made loaf is worse than between home-made burgers and cheap shop-bought ... there's no substance at all to cheap white bread).

I'd say it's more about what you cook. Depressing, but less meat is the big one IME. I do lots of meals where the meat content isn't zero but it's also not the main source of protein, and that works pretty well.

You have to be careful when comparing the quality. You've identified that HM meatballs are better quality than ready made, but that also applies to baking - yes you can get very cheap biscuits and cakes etc in the supermarket, but they're not very nice.

Jack Monroe did a good analysis, some years ago:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jan/07/jack-monroe-ready-meal-challenge

I think she tried to match the ingredients as close as possible (amount of meat etc) and in several examples, only one home made recipe was more expensive per portion than a ready meal and that was only a few pence.

If you're comparing home made fish pie, lasagne etc, you're making the equivalent of a £4/5 a portion Cook or Charlie Bigham version, not a 99 p frozen horsemeat with no cheese on top monstrosity.

Ready meals might be a similar price if you're only cooking for one person, but if you're cooking for a family, home made is always going to be far cheaper, especially if the quality is in the same ballpark.

I think it's not always cheaper to cook from scratch, but you can have more flexibility if you cook from scratch. How much salt/sugar etc to use, or alternate ingredients to suit you. And knowing you are not adding any unwanted ingredients like additives in long run may come cheaper in terms of health care cost.
Also if you regularly cook from the scratch, none of ingredients would be wasted, against when you decided to make something from scratch as a one off.

I think cheapie supermarkets custard creams and ginger nuts are quite nice I don't think I've got the patience for baking biscuits. I don't buy a lot of premade ready meals unless they're yellow stickered and freezable for quick eats. Apart from lasagna when it's on the tesco meal deal as ds likes it more than mine and I like the cheap wine :)

I agree with PP about quality. For really cheap homemade stuff, making accidentally vegan stuff is the answer. I made a massive pan of veg and lentil soup yesterday - about 400g split red lentils, 2 onions, a load of bendy carrots, 2 potatoes, 2 sticks of celery, a bit of dried thyme and a couple of stock cubes. Made 8 good portions of soup, which we'll have for dinner with a couple of slices of bread and butter. A Tesco can of lentil soup is 45p but I just did a rough calculation of how much that lot would be and I reckon if you bought the big packs of lentils, carrots etc it's about £2. You could also definitely bulk it out to go even further with more carrots and potatoes (19p for 1kg of carrots at Tesco ATM!) And it will be so much tastier than the cans. If you want to you can add a bit of chopped bacon in too. Basically legumes are the answer I think, and to cook stuff that I always imagine grandmas cook for their grandsons after they've been out playing in the cold all day! So dals, lentil soups or stews, chickpea curries, chickpea pasta dishes (i.e. with chickpeas and pasta in them not pasta made of chickpeas!) etc. Filling and cheap :)

(I should say that's grandmas round the world not just British ones!)

If you join the Facebook group feed yourself for £1 a day OP you'll get loads of ideas on there.

@Alez

(I should say that's grandmas round the world not just British ones!)

You're right though it's what my granny makes - vegetable soup, lentil soup, pasta bake and apple crumble. All good hearty food and not expensive to make.

A whole bag of flour in asda is 49p so using some of that to make biscuits is probably cheaper than buying a packet, especially if you have free eggs.

I can make bread but at double the cost of a loaf of cheap white from the supermarket
But your home made bread will be much nicer and probably healthier than the cheap white, with no preservatives etc. Its not comparing like with like.

Chilli con carne is quite cheap to make if you bulk it out with things like 30p kidney beans, a tin of baked beans, grated carrots etc. Basically minimal meat, I made a chilli with a kg of 25% fat minced beef and it did 12 adult portions because of how much I bulked it out with cheap ingredients.

We used to spend about £100-120 a month on groceries when we were being really frugal. We batch cooked and basically lived off bolognese bulked out with lots of veg, chilli bulked out, cottage pie, cheap tinned soup for lunches, porridge or muesli for breakfast. We didn't tend to buy bread. The bolognese and chilli was always served with rice which we bought in the big 4kg bags. But then I'm wheat intolerant so it worked for us.

Tbh you really can't compare like for like when comparing home made to ready meal type food.

It's all about the beans and lentils in our house. I use then to make chillis, stews, bolognese, lasagna, tagines, stews, all sorts. Very filling, healthy and dirt cheap.

If you're not used to them you could start off with 1/4 beans or lentils to 3/4 meat and work up.

The cheapest way to buy them is dried and in bulk, although this does mean most will need soaking unless you have an Instant Pot.

Not everything will be cheaper to make from scratch but the quality will be better. With the bread, a decent homemade loaf will be far nicer and will fill you up much more than the cheapest loaf from the supermarket.
I have a cake in the oven at the moment, and to buy the same cane would probably be cheaper than the ingredients I used(although I already had them in) but I know exactly what is in it( ingredients) compared to the huge list below of what is in a supermarket version.

ngredients
Chocolate Flavour Buttercream (21%) [Sugar, Unsalted Butter (Milk), Glucose Syrup, Water, Fat-Reduced Cocoa Powder, Dried Glucose Syrup, Cornflour, Preservative (Potassium Sorbate), Emulsifiers (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Polyglycerol Esters of Fatty Acids)], Sugar, Milk Chocolate (11%) [Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Cocoa Mass, Skimmed Milk Powder, Whey Powder (Milk), Anhydrous Milk Fat, Palm Oil, Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithins), Sal Oil, Mango Kernel Oil, Shea Oil], Belgian Milk Chocolate (9%) [Sugar, Whole Milk Powder, Cocoa Butter, Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder (Milk), Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithins), Flavouring], Fortified Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin (B3), Thiamin (B1)], Pasteurised Free Range Whole Egg, Glucose Syrup, Unsalted Butter (Milk), Whipping Cream (Milk), Fat-Reduced Cocoa Powder, Belgian Milk Chocolate Curls [Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Whole Milk Powder, Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder (Milk), Lactose (Milk), Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithins), Vanilla Extract], Water, Palm Oil, Dried Glucose Syrup, Humectant (Glycerol), Palm Kernel Oil, Pasteurised Free Range Egg White, Soya Flour, Invert Sugar Syrup, Rapeseed Oil, Skimmed Milk Powder, Palm Stearin, Raising Agents (Diphosphates, Sodium Carbonates), Grape Juice from Concentrate, Rice Starch, Emulsifiers (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Polyglycerol Esters of Fatty Acids), Preservatives (Potassium Sorbate, Acetic Acid), Cornflour, Acidity Regulator (Sodium Acetate), Flavouring, Colour (Iron Oxides)

Sorry I missed out how ingredients were in mine. It has 7 ingredients.

I have nothing useful to add - just that I don’t have a kitchen at the moment (nightmare - renovations gone wrong) and this thread has made me miss cooking so, so much. We are living off ready made crap at the moment and I really notice the difference. No judgement to those who live on ready made meals, but I miss making stuff myself.

As above, I don't think it's necessarily cheaper to cook from scratch unless you are buying a lot of expensive ready meals. I do it because it's healthier.

Batch cooking saves us a huge amount of money as theres always something in the freezer that can become a hearty meal in about 10mins if you freeze it thinly (The Batch Lady method) so it removes the temptation to reach for a ready meal at the shops instead or go for processed stuff.

I usually make two roasts a week, usually a chicken and beef or lamb and we use the leftovers from those in curries/ stirfries/ risotto/ pasta etc 2- 4 nights a week.

As a side point, you might not be aware but it's aactually against the law to feed your chickens scraps from the kitchen for very good animal and human health reasons.

@squee123 what sort of beans are you putting in your bolognese / stews? DH can't stand lentils so we don't use them in our house. Just wondering if I could use beans instead.

I have never really found cooking from scratch to be cheaper really, as there are only two of us and we only eat vegetarian food. I suppose chopped tomatoes are cheaper than a jar of sauce, but I don't think in our case jarred pesto would work out dearer than homemade.🤔

I think it's a different story for larger families who eat meat and fish though.

Bread. I can use fancy organic stone milled flour and still only costs me 50p a loaf

Canned chickpeas, borlotti beans, butter beans and canellini beans are all good with pasta and tomato-based stews and casseroles, I think, @CC2021.

You need lots of recipes and their variants and open to all sources of protein. Then you supplement it with enough bulking foods (vegetables and carbohydrates).
I have two fast-growing boys. We buy truckloads of potatoes and pasta and tanks of milk. Using slow cooker always helps when making bulk.

Main meals are almost always cheaper cooked yourself from basic ingredients, compared to buying ready meals or pre-prepared stuff. Usually a lot cheaper. There's no point trying to be a purist about it though. Tinned and frozen is fine. And stuff like burgers and fish fingers are probably cheaper to just buy. Stuff rich in pulses and vegetables is cheap to make though.

Home baking I would not expect to be cheaper than shop-bought. Home baking to me is a luxury activity.

You cannot possibly compare a home made dish against a “ cheapie” supermarket anything as if the only measure of value is cost. That’s so depressing. If I was looking to make savings I’d defiantly be cutting out a huge amount of meat. Miguel Barclay does a series of £1 recipe books - I borrowed from the library and photographed the recipes I liked.

It's economies of scale, and seasonal cooking. At the moment I can buy cauliflowers for under 50p so if you have the freezer space make cauli cheese - as much as you have space for.
The same goes for tomatoes. I make masses of tomato sauce for home made pizzas when tomatoes are cheap.
Home made shepherd's pie, lasagne, stew, soups - all taste much nicer than the ready meals.