Bread is a top 10 staple in this house. I didn’t grow up eating a lot of bread, but my husband ate it at nearly every meal as a child, so he still must.have.his.bread! When I make pasta and we don’t have bread in the house, my husband cannot enjoy it as much. It’s that important to him. Our girls are almost as bad, but that’s our faults for letting them eat so much of it every day.
© volff / Dollar Photo Club
Needless to say, we eat a lot of bread. Since January, we have been making Poor Man’s Bread anywhere from 2-3 times each week. I will make two loaves at a time, and we’ll eat through both loaves in just a couple days. There is no saving bread in the freezer around here!
Before I started making bread, I would try to only buy 1-2 loaves a week. That means now we are eating double or triple the amount of bread that we used to eat. Yikes! But those loaves of bread from the store were expensive compared to Poor Man’s Bread. The lowest price I used to pay for a loaf was $1.78, and sometimes I would have to spend $2.50 or more if I was shopping at the store closest to my house. Now we spend right around 50 cents for each loaf of homemade bread.
7 Ways to Save on Bread Costs
Over the years, I’ve learned a few ways to save money on bread that I thought I would pass on to you. If your family is anything like yours, you’ll want to save all the money you can on it!
Store bought
Not everyone has the time or equipment to make homemade bread. If you buy your bread, there are several ways to save. Use a combination of them and your savings will be even higher!
Check Sales and the Clearance Rack
A lot of times you can find a certain brand of bread on sale. If your family isn’t picky about what brand or type of bread you eat, you could probably buy some bread each week that is on sale. Some sales really aren’t that great, because the bread is still more expensive than I would like to pay, but evaluate it for your own specific circumstances.
The clearance rack is an awesome place to find really cheap bread. There is a clearance rack at the store I shop at every two weeks, and I always stop at it before leaving the store. It is right by the milk, so I just grab my milk and browse the selection of bread that is on clearance that day. Sometimes I will go home without any bread, but there will be times where I take a couple of different kinds home (French bread, sliced baguettes, rolls, wheat bread, etc.) because we will eat through it fast. I even bought some $0.79 bread a couple of months ago to make homemade bread crumbs.
Freeze It
Maybe your family doesn’t eat bread as quickly as mine does. You can still buy bread on sale or on the clearance rack and freeze what you don’t need at the moment. Even if you buy bread at full price and you only get through half the bag in a week, it is better to freeze what’s left than to wait for it to go moldy and have to throw it away.
Shop the Bread Outlet
If you live near a bread outlet, you are in luck! There are often top brands at the bread outlet near my house, but I have only been there twice because it is out of my way. If it was in between my house and the store I shop at regularly, I would go there each week to buy bread at a cheaper price. You do have to be careful about buying bread at these outlets because they can go moldly quickly. Buying bread at a bread outlet is a great choice if you know your family will eat it within a day or two. You can also freeze it, but make sure to use it up fast after you take it out of the freezer.
Homemade
Making your own bread at home can definitely save you some cash over buying it at the store. However, be aware that you have to spend your time to make the bread and it uses resources, like electricity, that you have to pay more for.
Make Poor Man’s Bread
Like I mentioned above, we make Poor Man’s Bread often. It’s so cheap and delicious that I have a hard time justifying buying bread anymore. I happen to have a stand mixer that mixes and kneads my bread dough for me. I have never made bread with a bread machine or with my hands, so I can’t tell you if this recipe would work in those ways.
Avoid Expensive Ingredients
Last year I did a cost comparison of store-bought and homemade bread. This was before I had ever made Poor Man’s Bread, and I made two other recipes that we love to eat. While both of these recipes ended up costing less than store-bought bread, they were not cheap to make. The ingredients themselves make the bread more expensive. Both recipes require honey, and that significantly increases the cost of the breads. Olive oil and whole wheat flour are two other culprits for hiking up the price of homemade bread. Poor Man’s Bread, on the other hand, only requires flour, water, yeast, and salt, and all these ingredients are fairly cheap.
Buy the Ingredients at Lower Prices
If you can keep the cost of each ingredient to a minimum, your homemade bread will be even less expensive. I used to buy a 25 pound bag of all-purpose flour for $7.99 or more, and this kept the cost of my bread higher than it should have been. Ever since we started buying flour at Costco, though, we lowered the cost to $6.39 for 25 pounds. Try to get the best price you can on salt, yeast, and flour. If you like to make bread recipes that require honey or oil, be sure to find them for lower prices as well.
Make Extra Loaves
If you are going to turn on the oven for one loaf of bread, you might as well make two. Pretty much all bread recipes can be doubled or made in batches and then baked side-by-side in the oven. If your family won’t eat the second loaf right away, freeze it.
As you can see, paying full price for bread or spending more than you should on homemade bread can be a thing of the past with these 7 ways to save. If your family likes bread as much as mine, though, you will probably end up just eating more bread for the same price!
How do you save on bread?
Want some ideas for making your own bread? Check out my Bread Bonanza board on Pinterest:
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Our family doesn’t eat much bread these days, but I used to make 6 loaves at once and then freeze the extras. So very old school, but it worked. We used a stand mixer too. I can’t imagine actually kneading all that dough by hand. Kudos to our grandmas for making that happen!
Six loaves?! Can you put them all in the oven at once or did they take turns?
Since I recommitted to baking bread this year, I have yet to buy a loaf of store bought bread. I have a mixer, too, and love how easy it makes making bread! I tried french bread yesterday, and that turned out pretty well too. Yay for delicious and frugal homemade bread!
Isn’t bread baking so satisfying, Kristen? I am glad your French bread turned out! I have tried several recipes, and they all have tasted great.