Is It Cheaper to Make Your Own Bread?

Roughly, yes: a loaf baked at home from flour, yeast, salt and your own oven costs about £1, which beats a bakery bloomer and comfortably beats an artisan sourdough. It doesn't beat the very cheapest sliced loaf on the supermarket shelf, because that loaf is priced as a loss leader and made from ingredients no home baker would choose. The honest comparison depends on what you're weighing it against, so here's the actual arithmetic.

What a loaf actually costs, ingredient by ingredient

The standard beginner loaf uses 500g of strong white flour, 7g of fast-action dried yeast, 10g of salt and water. Working through each at current UK supermarket prices:

Flour. Own-brand strong white flour runs about £1.40 for a 1.5kg bag at Tesco, which works out to roughly 93p a kilo. Half a kilo for one loaf is about 47p.

Yeast. Fast-action dried yeast sold in multipacks of eight 7g sachets costs around £1.55 to £1.95, so one sachet is roughly 19 to 24p.

Salt. A tub of table salt lasts months of baking. The 10g a loaf needs is a couple of pence, not worth arguing over.

Energy. This is the cost people forget. Under the current Ofgem price cap, electricity runs at about 26p per kWh. Baking a loaf in a Dutch oven at a high temperature, with preheat included, uses roughly 1 to 1.3kWh depending on your oven, which comes to around 30p.

Add it up and you land close to £1 a loaf: about 47p flour, 20p yeast, 2p salt, and 30p energy. Water and washing-up liquid are rounding errors. That figure holds whether you're making a plain white loaf or something fancier, since the extras (a handful of seeds, an egg wash) add pence, not pounds.

What you're comparing it to matters

"Cheaper than what" does most of the work in this question, because bread in a UK supermarket spans a huge price range for reasons that have nothing to do with how good the bread is.

At the bottom, the basic own-brand sliced white loaf costs 55 to 75p. It is priced deliberately low as a way to bring shoppers into the shop, and it is made with additives, a high water content and a fast commercial process that a home baker isn't trying to replicate. Comparing your loaf to this one is comparing two different products, not two prices for the same thing.

A step up, an in-store bakery white bloomer, baked from a part-prepared mix rather than scratch ingredients, costs around £1.45 to £1.95 for an 800g loaf, occasionally more for a "finest" or stonebaked version. This is the closer comparison in terms of what actually comes out of the oven, and your homemade loaf at roughly £1 beats it, sometimes comfortably.

At the top, an artisan sourdough from an independent bakery costs £3 to £5 a loaf. That price reflects a slow fermentation, a baker's time and, usually, a genuinely better loaf than either supermarket option. It's also the loaf your homemade version is most likely to be chasing in quality, and at a fifth of the price, home baking wins outright once you've got the technique down. The bread baking course walks through getting a proper crust and open crumb from your own oven, which is most of what separates a supermarket loaf from a bakery one.

The equipment cost, and why it barely matters

Starting from nothing, the course reckons on £15 to £25: a mixing bowl (often already owned), digital scales at £8 to £15, and a heavy lidded pot for baking. That pot is the one item worth being careful about. A purpose-bought Dutch oven can run to £200 or more for a Le Creuset, but a plain cast iron or enamel casserole from a charity shop or eBay does exactly the same job in the oven for £20 to £40 secondhand.

Spread across even a modest habit of baking once a fortnight, that £20 to £40 pot pays for itself against bakery bread within two or three loaves, and against a supermarket bloomer within the first ten or so. After that, every loaf is close to pure ingredient cost. This is the part of the sum that home economics articles tend to skip: the equipment is a one-off, not a recurring cost, so the more you bake, the less it matters.

Where sourdough changes the sum further

There is one way to bring the per-loaf cost down further, and it's worth knowing even if you're starting with yeasted bread: a sourdough starter, once established, replaces the shop-bought yeast sachet with wild yeast you feed with flour and water you'd be buying anyway. No more 20p sachets, and no risk of an expired packet ruining a bake. The trade-off is time, not money: a starter takes several days to become reliable, and a sourdough loaf takes hours longer to prove than a yeasted one. If the arithmetic above has you interested but you're not ready to commit to a starter, the sourdough course covers building and maintaining one from scratch, and it's the natural next step once a straightforward yeasted loaf feels routine.

Either way, getting the loaf itself right matters more than the ingredient maths, because a dense or badly shaped loaf is £1 wasted rather than £1 well spent. Shaping a boule properly, so the loaf holds its shape through the final prove and the bake, is a ten-minute skill that makes the difference between a loaf that looks like it came from a bakery and one that looks like a brick.

The occasional baker's maths

Everything above assumes baking often enough that flour and yeast get used before they go off, which is where the calculation can quietly go wrong for someone starting out. An unopened bag of strong flour keeps for the better part of a year in a cool, dry cupboard, but once opened it's best used within a few months, faster if your kitchen runs warm or damp. Yeast sachets keep well unopened but lose potency once exposed to air.

The fix for an occasional baker isn't to bake more often than you want to. It's to buy in smaller quantities: a 1kg bag of flour rather than 3kg, and yeast in the smaller multipacks rather than a bulk box, even though the per-kilo price looks slightly worse on the shelf sticker. A stale sachet of yeast that produces a flat loaf costs you more in wasted flour, salt and an hour of your evening than the few extra pence you saved buying in bulk.

The short version

• A homemade 800g loaf, following a standard beginner recipe, costs about £1: roughly 47p flour, 20p yeast, 2p salt and 30p oven energy at current UK prices.
• It beats an in-store bakery bloomer (£1.45 to £1.95) and comfortably beats an artisan sourdough (£3 to £5), but not the cheapest own-brand sliced loaf (55 to 75p), which is a different product made to a different price point.
• Equipment is a one-off cost, not a recurring one: £15 to £25 to start, with a secondhand cast iron pot (£20 to £40) doing the job of a £200 Dutch oven.
• A sourdough starter removes the yeast cost entirely after the first week, at the price of extra time per loaf.
• Buy flour and yeast in quantities you'll actually use before they go stale. A wasted sachet costs more than the bulk discount saved.