To think cooking from scratch is not always cheaper?

[RainbowSlidders]

I would like to start by saying due to allergies I do cook and bake from scratch. I see people on here saying it’s so much cheaper cooking everything from scratch but honestly I think a lot of time it isn’t although it is definitely nicer.

Last night I made spaghetti bolognaise the ingredients cost me over £18 for 6 portions (family of 5 plus 1 portion for dc to take back to uni). How is that cheaper? A jar of sauce is about 75p in Aldi so I can see why people use it and not to mention the extra cost of fuel and the time it takes, 30 minutes on the hob followed by 3.5 hours in the oven.

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.

@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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Charlie Bingham's Bolognese is £6 a portion, which might be the equivalent to your recipe.

I remember years ago cooking delias chocolate bread and butter pudding and the ingredients costing about 20quid, in the nineties. I was horrified. I imagine if you are a regular cook then you have a lot of this stuff in. I did an Ocado lamb and barley soup last week and the ingredients were over 20.00 for three portions. I could have bought canz of heinz much cheaper

Not in any of the stores I have been in. I see the occasional cut price salad or something that is out of date today - but not much more than that. The yellow sticker items are only ever put out shortly before the store shuts. Maximum 2 hours before, so like as late as 6-7pm. I am never out at the shops that late. And the shops are a 30 minute round trip drive for me.

I can get 6 adult portions of bolognese from 250g of mince by adding chopped bacon, onion, grated carrot, celery and finely chopped mushrooms plus garlic, budget chopped tomatoes, mixed herbs and some beef stock. I don't like mushrooms but finely chopped in bolognese they merge with the mince and I can eat them.
My DDs had food allergies when they were small plus I have IBS so I have had to cook from scratch. I batch cook for the freezer using yellow stickered meat plus put yellow stickered meat in the freezer for another day. I can definitely cook from scratch for cheaper than ready meals or jarred sauces.

Well yes it’s not going to be true if you’re comparing a recipe like the one you’ve made. You cannot compare that to a cheating of bolognese sauce which will be and from very cheap tomatoes, some flavouring and a tiny bit of mince thrown in.

🙄

But the comparison doesn't make sense, you are not comparing like for like.
We never use sauce jars but out of curiosity now, I have checked some brands of 'bolognese sauce' and most of them don't even have any meat at all! I have checked four brands, only one had meat, but just 16%. How much meat would a home made bolognese sauce have? Probably minimum 30/40%, so they are completely different things, uncomparable.

This is pertinent to me as I was just listening to a description of a study done in which two groups of people were fed different diets. One group fed processed foods and the other fed by chefs who were tasked with matching the nutritional value of the processed diet (low bar that it is).

The Cooked From Scratch diet, keeping in mind those cooking were professionals and cooking on some scale, was a LOT more expensive than the processed diet. Around $100 compared to $150 per day (to feed everyone).

It obviously depends on the ingredients you are putting into it. I can make a spag bol for far cheaper than that. But you aren't comparing like for like quality. The jars are bloody disgusting, they're UPFs and full of sugar and salt. If I was buying your ingredient list I would compare it to eating out in a restaurant.

If I am makong somwthing that requires a long time in the oven, I
plan to cook a number of things at the same time to maximise oven usage.

@Unpaidviewer they always have a horrid bitter/metallic taste to me.