at Sat, 10 Sep 2005 11:53:06 GMT in <1126353186.060087.261260
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>, wrote :

>I started making cornbread a while ago and found it's very cheap to
>make from scratch. You get a 4 lb bag of cornmeal for $4 and 4 pound
>bag of flour for $2 and some other stuff and you can make many big pans
>of cornbread.
>
>I just bought a can of Hershey cocoa powder for about $4.19, and OMG it
>goes a long way. You can make a cup of hot cocoa with only 2 or 3
>teaspoons of cocoa. That's a helluva lot cheaper than Swiss Miss, isn't
>it? I wish I had found this out a long time ago, cuz I would've had hot
>cocoa more often. I made a couple of batches of chocolate pudding and
>still have most of the cocoa left.
>

Most of the things that are mostly staple grains - wheat, corn, barley,
rice, etc. are dirt cheap and when made from scratch better than commercial
versions. Thus breads and pasta of all types look pretty economical. Same
thing goes with beans. Thus soups and baked beans are also cheap. Another
one you can make with little effort and which is very versatile is polenta.

That being said, the labour involved with those types of preparations
varies from minimal to intensive. So partly it's a decision as to how many
labour hours you want to trade off for ingredient savings. For instance,
I've made pasta regularly enough that it's truly cheap for me to make it,
in the sense that I can whip out a batch in under an hour total time.
However, if it were your first time, it might take you longer. Baked beans,
soups, and stews, OTOH, are always economical because it's basically a case
of dump-it-all-in-a-pot-and-forget-about-it. You come back a few hours
later and you're done. Soups, especially, are economical for the same
reason that they have been since time immemorial - they let you maximise
the use of scraps and other food that might otherwise have gone to waste.
It's cheap, furthermore, to make stock as a soup base and then you can add
whatever you want to it at a later date for a quick, delicious soup.

Very few people in the USA seem to make basic grains and beans as a main
meal component. I like to make barley, wheat, rye, you name it, simply by
simmering in a pot for a while. It's really pretty delicious and dirt
cheap. You can give it more flavour interest by simmering it in a stock.
Barley in mushroom stock, for instance, is really amazing, good for cold
winter nights. Most people take what grains they have in baked-goods form -
e.g. bread, cake, muffins, etc (sadly, a lot of it as the latter, very
sugary, fatty items that can't be considered basic components of a main
meal IMHO)

Breads are very cheap to make, but like pasta practice makes perfect and
initially you might spend considerable time for bread not nearly as good as
you could find in a decent bakery. I make bread pretty regularly but I also
recognise that those who don't aren't being spendthrift. Bakery bread is
comparatively expensive (at least for good stuff), but, somewhat like
espresso, when the need is for something instant-consume with minimal
effort or forethought on your part, you've got to question seriously the
wisdom of going through the work. My actual reason for baking bread has
little to do with cost savings but rather that the "style" of quality bread
in Seattle is, virtually without exception, sourdough, to the point where
it seems in people's minds for a bread even to qualify as quality it *must*
be a sourdough-type bread. That's not a style of bread I like and so baking
it myself is really the only choice.

This is another reason to make things yourself - getting things the way you
like them. Your cocoa example is a case in point. Packaged "cocoa" mixes
are mostly vile, artificial, cloyingly sweet creations, and even elite
cocoa from, say, coffeeshops, to me is unacceptably mild. I personally like
2-3 tbsp of cocoa and perhaps 1 tsp sugar to a cup of milk for a good hot
cocoa (so that it's not, perhaps, economical) and this is way, way more
potent than any commercial operation is likely to supply.

By contrast the quickest way to escalate the price rapidly is to make
things with ingredients that are already expensive in relative terms.
Meats, fats, especially butter, fruits, and nuts are the main culprits.
Spices are expensive but you don't use much at a time so with discretion
they don't break the budget but used universally will quickly push up the
price. Some vegetables are very expensive - mushrooms, tomatoes, green
beans - in fresh form, while others - carrots, celery, cabbage - are cheap.
But in general using fresh vegetables is another way it's easy to get
expensive. Cheap is more or less the diet of our lower-class ancestors,
mostly beans and grains, with other stuff used only as garnish. Expensive
is the diet of luxury which has become much more widespread than it was
historically, meat-and-vegetable based.


--
Alex Rast

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