How Much Does Homemade Cost?

In order to calculate the cost of your recipes, you need to determine the cost of your ingredients. Some recipes will use an entire package of something while others will only use a portion of an ingredient. In order to show you how this works in each case, I will use two recipes, one for brownies and one for hashbrown casserole. The first is made from portions of common ingredients and the other is made mostly from entire packages.

Brownies
1 C sugar
1 C melted butter
1 T vanilla
2 eggs
½ C flour
1/3 C cocoa
¼ t salt
¼ t baking powder
½ package of chocolate chips
Once, when I was in high school, I was making several loaves of bread and needed to know how much flour to buy. I called our local library reference desk and asked them how many cups of flour are in a 5 pound bag. The answer was 18-20 cups. Sugar is a little less as the grains sit closer to each other. Sugar is about 15-18 cups per 5 pound bag. Using this information, I can calculate how much sugar and flour cost per cup. The last time I bought sugar, I paid $1.89 for a bag/15 cups = $0.38 per cup. The last time I bought flour, I paid $0.82 for a bag/18 cups = $0.05 per cup. Since this recipe only uses ½ a cup of flour, the flour cost is $0.025, which I would round to $0.03.

The price of butter can vary widely. The regular, non-sale price in my local stores is $2.79. However, I rarely buy butter at that price. I wait for it to go on sale and buy 20 or more pounds at a time. I do a lot of baking, and I have a freezer I can put the butter in until I need to use it. I can get butter for $1.50 per pound on sale/4 = $0.38 per stick.

The vanilla I use is Mexican vanilla purchased by a friend while on vacation in Mexico for $12/liter. Based on internet research, a liter contains approximately 65 tablespoons so $12/65 = $0.18 per tablespoon.

I try to get eggs for about $0.10 each, which is a price of $1.20 per dozen. I can usually do this and can frequently get them for less. I can often find eggs on sale for $0.99/12 eggs = $0.08. For this recipe, we will assume I got them at the higher price so the total for eggs is $0.20.

I make a lot of brownies (I probably make this recipe once a week) and a lot of cakes. For this reason, I purchased a 5 pound bag of cocoa from my local cake/restaurant supply place. This cost $18 and since it has a similar volume to flour, I estimate that there are 18-20 cups in the bag. $18/18 = $1 per cup. Since this recipe uses only 1/3 of a cup, $1/3= $0.33.

Salt and baking powder are both ingredients that I have in such high volume at such a low cost, that I do not calculate how much they cost for a recipe. It would be fractions of a penny. Since I have already rounded numbers up for the cost of flour and other products, I assume the cost of these ingredients would be covered by that rounding.

I purchased chocolate chips for $0.67 a bag on a clearance sale and put them in my freezer until used. So for ½ a bag, chocolate chips cost $0.67/2 = $0.34

Therefore, the brownies cost:
$0.38 for sugar
$0.38 for butter
$0.18 for vanilla
$0.20 for eggs
$0.03 for flour
$0.33 for cocoa
$0.34 for chocolate chips
$1.84
In order to compare this to packages in the store, you would need to either calculate the cost of only the dry ingredients in your recipe or you would need to add the cost of the ingredients needed to add to the mix to determine its true cost to you. The cost of sugar, vanilla, flour, and cocoa for the above recipe is $0.92. The store brand packaged brownie mix at my local store is about $0.99, so I am saving a few cents making my own rather than buying the store brand. In order to make a finished product from the store mix, I need to add eggs, and butter. If I go with the eggs, butter, and chocolate chips to the mix, the total completed recipe would cost $0.99+ $0.20+$0.38+$0.34 = $1.91.

At this point, I need to determine if the amount of money I am saving is worth making the recipe from scratch. I believe it is. The taste of the brownies I make at home is superior to the ones in the box. In truth, I started making brownies because my husband loves the taste of the Ghirardelli brownie mix. That mix was costing $1.70 per mix purchased at the warehouse store and it included chocolate chips in the mix. My dry mix with chocolate chips is $1.28, a significant savings. In reality, what I was replacing was not the store brand mix - I wouldn’t have bought that anyway - but the higher cost name brand. My husband likes the taste of my homemade brownies better than the Ghirardelli mix we were buying.

I also think it is worth making the brownies since the ingredients are ones I always have around the house. If my husband has a craving for brownies, I can just whip them up any time and pop them in the oven. I don’t have to say, “I’m sorry honey, but we are out of brownie mix.” We are never out of brownie mix.

I make these brownies so often, I no longer need to look at the recipe. I can mix up the whole batch in about 5 minutes, so there is not a time savings to using a mix versus straight ingredients.

Keep in mind, that if you determine how much your basic ingredients cost on a per cup, tablespoon, and teaspoon basis, you can quickly calculate how much a recipe will cost you to make. You can make yourself a table reflecting ingredients you commonly use and the price you have actually paid. It might look something like this:

Hashbrown Casserole
1 bag (2 lb) frozen hash brown potatoes (let thaw a little)
1 pint sour cream
1 can cream of mushroom soup
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/4 lb melted margarine
4 C crushed cornflakes
1 tsp salt
Most of these ingredients are actual packages, so you would use your actual purchase price. There are a couple of exceptions, so let me talk about these first.

To me, the trickiest ingredient on this list to figure out is the cornflakes. I bought a box of cornflakes, crushed them and measured. I made three recipes using the crushed cornflakes, so I would not waste them. The 18 oz box of cornflakes yielded approximately 10 cups of crushed cornflakes. I purchased the box for $1.27/10 cups = $0.127 per cup x 4 cups for this recipe = $0.50 for the cornflakes.

Cheese is definitely an expensive ingredient. The trick here is not to assume you need to buy the cheese already shredded. It also helps to look at the unit pricing on the shelves. The quantity of cheese needed for this recipe is equivalent to an 8 oz bag of already shredded cheese. You can also buy a block of cheese and shred it yourself. The unit pricing on the cheese tells you what the price per ounce is. In my case, the already shredded cheese was $0.194 per ounce. The block cheese which I had to shred myself was $0.174 per ounce. By buying the block and shredding it myself, I saved $0.16 on this recipe. I had to buy a 16 ounce block of cheese, twice as much as I needed for this recipe. I shredded all of it at one time and put the extra in a Ziploc bag in my freezer. Next time I need 2 cups of shredded cheese, it is waiting in my freezer. It is important when using this strategy that you will use the extra amount of the ingredient immediately or are able to store it until you will use it, or you will not be saving any money. In this case, I paid $2.77 for the block of cheese/2 since I used half of it = $1.39.

The last time I bought onions, I bought a 3 pound bag for $1.43. There are approximately 8 onions in the bag, so the cost per onion is $1.43/8 = $0.18. I only used ½ of an onion for this recipe, so the cost of onion is $0.09. Again, if you will end up not using that other ½ onion, you will be losing $0.09. I used the other half in another recipe I made the same day.

Margarine was purchased for $0.50 per pound/4 =$0.13 per stick.

All the other ingredients used the entire packages, so I can simply take the cost of my store receipt:

$1.37 for Hashbrowns
$1.22 for sour cream
$0.50 for mushroom soup
$1.39 for cheese
$0.09 for onion
$0.50 for cornflakes
$0.13 for margarine
$5.20 for the whole recipe

I might also figure out a per serving cost for the recipe. In this case, I repackaged the food into single serving size containers. It came out to 6 containers, so the cost per serving is $5.20/6 = $0.87. My husband and I take containers out of the freezer to use for lunches. This saves us a lot of money. If I were to buy prepackaged frozen dinners, the cost would be anywhere from $1.00 to $3.00 each. My homemade servings are a larger serving size than the food provided in a frozen meal. If we were buying food out while at work, it would cost $4 to $10 or more.

Doing this kind of main dish calculation can help you when doing your meal planning. You can determine how much different dishes cost you to make, and can use that information to determine how frequently you make a specific dish. More expensive dishes might be saved for special occasions. Or perhaps the ingredient that makes a dish expensive might be on sale. You can stock up on that item when you find it on sale and store it so you can have a dish on a more regular basis.

If you have a spouse who hesitates to take ‘leftovers’ for lunch, this type of calculation may be a powerful motivator. Using this type of calculation can also help a stay at home wife quantify her contributions to the household or encourage a working wife to make the extra effort needed to cook at home rather than picking up some fast food. Let’s say I would have eaten out 6 times at $4 per meal. This would have cost $24. The casserole above cost $5.20 so I saved $24-$5.20 = $18.80. If I am in a 25% tax bracket, I would have had to earn $25 gross in order to be able to pay $18.80 extra for food. A working woman can figure out how many hours at work it would take her to make $25. A stay at home woman can see that she added $25 worth of value to the family budget.

As you can see, I like doing calculations! Even if you find the calculations tedious, keep in mind that you only need to do most of them one time in order to give yourself a guideline. The end result of your work is that you will now have a tool in hand to help you make financially informed decisions in an area all of us face on a daily basis.

Karen has been baking and cooking since she was about 10 years old. She is also an accomplished cake decorator and a member of the Confectionary Artists Guild of Orlando. Currently, she does once a month cooking – spending a Sunday afternoon making several meals, packaging them into serving size portions and putting them in the freezer. Karen has been a vegetarian for essentially her entire life. Her husband, Chris, is not a vegetarian so all the recipes Karen submits for this site will be taste-tested by him to ensure appeal to non-vegetarian palates! Karen and Chris have been married for just over a year and do not yet have any children. They have three cats – Pepper, Puck and Tiger!