I run a small home bakery and I’m trying to make more of my ingredients from scratch instead of buying them pre made.
For example, I recently learned you can make brown sugar with white sugar & molasses. I’d love to find more simple swaps like that for common baking ingredients or pantry staples.
Main goals are saving money, having more control over ingredients, and keeping things simple/less processed.
Any ideas?
Home baker here, what ingredients are worth making from scratch for better value?
byu/west_kay24 inFrugal
Posted by west_kay24
12 Comments
My family has bought hard red wheat berries in bulk and ground them into whole wheat flour with a little milk but that can be pretty labor intensive (especially if you bake in large batches and end up needing like seven cups of flour)
Along the same lines as brown sugar= white sugar + molasses, you could make vanilla sugar with white sugar + vanilla bean (or vanilla paste or extract). I’m not a baker, but I’ve always wanted to try out vanilla sugar. Costco at one point had a really good deal on vanilla beans. I think Trader Joe’s had them low priced the last time I was there. Costco might still have vanilla paste, which was also pretty well priced.
Make your own vanilla extract and vanilla paste. Extract takes a few months, but the paste can be used immediately.
every other ingredient I can think of would involve farming or a chemistry degree.
There’s a book called “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter”. You may find it interesting. It covers many simple items and a recommendation to make, buy, or ‘it doesn’t really matter’. It also talks about the level of hassle involved in making the item.
Chocolate and hot sauce. Haha, not together. Separate.
not what you asked but check out restaurant supply stores, costco, sams club for ingredients
Extracts and food coloring. Idk if you already do icing but thats an easy one. Basically anything with more than one ingredient. Frugality will depend on costs in your area and being successful at it.
Growing your own herbs makes a huge difference if you use them in your bakes.
Make anything that purchasing would mean it includes high fructose corn syrup.
I make my own flour in a blender. I get the healthiest whole grain bread (wheat, rye, spelt, you name it). I also make my own sourdough starters. And I don’t just make bread. I make phyllo and pastry dough.
When I see what they charge now in stores for whole grain bread, tortillas and other baked good, I cringe.
I also make my own nut flours. Pignoli cookies are the best with homemade almond flour <3.
Home baker here.
Your wording is a little unclear: do you mean a *commercial bakery* or you mean baking for family and friends?
If you’re doing this for profit, then time is money and DIY hacks which work on a small scale aren’t necessarily worth your while. For example, there are substitutions of whole milk + vinegar which can work in place of buttermilk for biscuits, but the savings is mostly in not buying a product that is too much for the single batch a home baker wants to make and in saving a trip to the store. If you’re baking hundreds of biscuits then you’ll use plenty of buttermilk and you might as well save time.
Similarly with DIY baking powder: yes, it can be made at home–but the home version isn’t as precise and reliable. Trust me; I’ve walked that walk. When it comes to baking, if one ingredient goes bonkers then the time of the whole project and the rest of the ingredients may be wasted.
If you’re really looking to add premium value–either for a home catering business or just to impress a social circle–then a simpler way to get there is to practice technique and learn the underlying science, and figure out how to customize recipes.
Such as, suppose you make cream puffs. A big cream puff sells for $8 at the local high end bakery in our area; that would be $96 a dozen. Once you own the equipment, the ingredients for two dozen bakery style cream puffs costs around $15. That’s more than a tenfold savings. Then when you look at what some small kitchen are doing, they basically charge a premium over that price for specialty flavored fillings. Again if you know your stuff, what that baker is doing is substituting a different extract for vanilla. Theoretically I *might* make lavender extract from scratch, but it’s simpler to buy it. Then I show up to the party in the hills with trays of lavender cream puffs.
For my use, one of the most versatile tools to own is a bread machine. Use it to knead and rise doughs, then do the final prep and finish things off in the oven.
And as others are saying, restaurant supply stores are good options for commercial bakers (or for serious home bakers). Do educate yourself before you buy in bulk: learn the shelf life of different ingredients, and storage techniques, and track your use so you don’t over-purchase.