Thursday, January 5, 2023

Inflation Resolution

Hearty seed bread goes great with nut butter!
Last spring, around the time food costs began to skyrocket, I was busy with planting season… and buying my usual food items without checking the prices. At the grocery checkout, I’d vaguely noticed I was writing bigger checks. 

But didn’t pay much attention until this past summer, when I started checking my receipts once I got home.

Whoa! What an education. The cost of this or that item had noticeably increased: $.25, $.50, and more often than not, by $1.00. Or more! And a dollar here and a dollar there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

When I first noticed that the price of the artisanal whole wheat bread that John and I like (made with locally-milled wheat) had gone up by a dollar, I wasn’t alarmed. I liked my own homemade organic bread even better. 

At the time, we had a whole quart of home-raised honey on hand—a gift from a friend. Since I could be lavish with honey, I vowed to bake my own bread more often.

You can find the recipe in my April 17, 2022 blog post. I like to think my bread is a bit artisanal too, since it’s made with organic, locally-milled whole wheat flour, and the wheat for the white flour is grown and milled just 40 miles away.

Anyway, I had good intentions. Then my garden chores and family responsibities stepped up, and sure enough, we were back to buying the expensive bread without a blink. Once in a while, I would bake a loaf to supplement it, but the purchased bread was once again our mainstay.

Fast-forward to the present: the store-bought bread suddenly went up another dollar. It’s now $9.95. When I saw the receipt, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head. Ten dollars for a loaf of bread!

Well, that kind of spend (on bread that wasn’t even organic) was my personal tipping point.

It was past time to get serious about going homemade. I baked one loaf of bread last Thursday. Then yesterday, we ran out so I started another loaf. Never have I ever baked bread twice in one week!

I slightly tweaked the recipe: cutting down on honey and adding a couple of teaspoons of organic sugar, and a handful of rolled barley to make it a three-grain loaf.

And even if John still likes buying the expensive store-bought bread for variety, I have resolved to personally rely on my own home-baked as much as possible.

Then last night, waiting for the bread to rise, I had a little epiphany: if I was going to go all in with my own bread, the least I should do is find out how much money I was saving…Or if I was really saving much at all.

I checked a recent grocery receipt, a shop when we stocked up on all our baking supplies. The price of white flour was the same it had been all year, but whole wheat bread flour had gone up by about 25%. 

Then in that same receipt, I discovered our usual pint of local honey was up to $15!

I admit, it feels a little insane to spend that much on honey…but here’s my excuse. John and I rarely eat out. So we spend almost all our food budget at the grocery store—and spoil ourselves with really high-quality items.

Still, doing some very rough calculations—and cutting the honey down by half in my recipe—I came up with the approximate cost of my home-baked: about $3 for flours, maybe about a dollar for honey. 

The other ingredients--yeast, olive oil, a spoonful of organic sugar and some salt, and sprinkling of seeds and rolled barley--came to another $1.50, max. The total: around $5.50/loaf.

Last night, I told John about computing the cost of my homemade bread—and he asked me a surprising question: “So, did you factor in your time?”

“I actually didn’t,” I confessed. It’s true, the whole process takes at least a couple of hours, mixing and kneading and baking and cleaning up. Which then brings up the question: what is your time worth?

If you’re self-employed, like me, it gets complicated, doesn’t it? Especially if you spend lots of time growing food, like I do, instead of working on your business. And John is really good about helping me protect my writing time. 

But I realized something else. It’s not only about money. The mini-mediation break I get while kneading dough, and the pleasure of eating such delicious and good-for-you bread more than offsets the time I spend on it.

And while we don’t make special trips into civilization just to buy bread, we do save time and gas not having to drive to the bakery when we are in the city.

In any event, I can make a delicious, organic loaf using many local ingredients for almost half the cost of high-quality purchased bread. Food prices being what they are—always going up and never down—I plan to make this resolution stick!

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