Make or buy: food items

Back in July, I posted about which personal care products Brian and I make at home and which ones we buy. That post was fairly popular, so I thought folks might be interested in a similar one about food products. We tend to come down on the "make" side a bit more often where food is concerned because most foodstuffs are a lot easier to make in your own kitchen than, say, soap. Food recipes generally don't call for obscure (and often pricey) ingredients or special equipment. They're written for home cooks, so they only include things the average home cook is likely to have.

Bread: Make

Brian and I have never been in the habit of buying bread—neither the good stuff from the bakery nor the cheap, squishy loaves at the supermarket. When we first got married, we had a bread machine, so either of us could quickly throw together a loaf of any bread we fancied. When that machine died back in 2013, Brian started making all our bread by hand. He'd always enjoyed working with dough, and this just gave him an excuse to do it more often.

His go-to recipe is Brian's Basic Brown Bread, which costs us about $1.70 per batch (85 cents per loaf) and requires about half an hour of hands-on work. Even with the cost of the fuel used to bake it, it's probably under a dollar a loaf. A loaf of supermarket whole-wheat bread costs around $3, so he's saving us $2 per loaf by baking it himself. That works out to $8 per hour—more than the pathetic federal minimum wage, but only about half of New Jersey's. But since he enjoys the process, it doesn't feel like work to him.

Buns: Buy

Although Brian is very good at baking bread, for some reason his skill doesn't translate to making hot-dog or hamburger rolls. He's tried it a few times, and the buns always come out kind of flat, not at all the right shape for a burger or a dog. Maybe if we ate them more often, he'd keep working on trying to master this baking skill, but for the few times a year we cook veggie burgers on the grill, it's much easier to pick up a bag of buns for $1 at Lidl.

Tortillas: Make

We used to assume that flour tortillas, like buns, wouldn't be worth the effort to make from scratch. But the first time Brian tried making his own, using a simple recipe he found online, we discovered that homemade tortillas are reasonably easy and much, much tastier than the packaged kind. He started out making them with all-purpose flour, but eventually he switched to chakki atta flour from Costco, which makes a more fiber-rich tortilla without compromising the texture. A batch of 16 tortillas costs about 85 cents, or 5.3 cents per tortilla—about one-sixth the price of whole-wheat tortillas from the store. And, as I said, so much better.

Plant butter: Make

Back when we were regular dairy users, Brian and I used butter for baking and Blue Bonnet vegetable-oil spread on toast. When we shifted away from dairy, we switched from real butter to Country Crock plant butter. At around $5 a pound, it was actually more expensive than the real thing, but it was the plant-based product that gave us the best result for cookies and shortcrusts.

Until, that is, we tried the homemade plant butter recipe from The Loopy Whisk. At roughly $1.30 for a 2-cup batch, it was less than half the price of the Country Crock and even slightly cheaper than the Blue Bonnet, and it was perfectly suitable for both baking and spreading. Plus, it contained no palm oil, an ecologically questionable ingredient (though, as I've since learned, not nearly as harmful as it's made out to be). And since it takes only a few minutes to whip up a batch, using it is a complete no-brainer.

Plant milk: Buy

One of the greatest annoyances in the ecofrugal life is that plant-based milks, which are unequivocally better for the environment than dairy milk, are also significantly more expensive. In an attempt to cut the cost (and reduce packaging waste), we've made several attempts over the years to make our own plant milk from oats, canned coconut milk, and almonds, but they were all a lot of hassle. Moreover, none of them had a taste or texture as good as the commercial stuff, and a few (like our first attempt at oatmilk) were outright undrinkable. Even though some of these homemade recipes were significantly cheaper than the $2.44 we pay for half a gallon of soymilk at Lidl, the savings just weren't enough to justify the work involved. (Besides, soymilk is the only plant-based "schmilk" that has as much protein as the cow-based variety.)

Coffee creamer: Buy

My favorite plant-based coffee creamer used to be Silk Protein milk, which had a nice creamy texture, a neutral flavor, plenty of protein, and very little sugar. Unfortunately, it became much harder to find when our local supermarket closed down, and it now appears to have been discontinued altogether. In an attempt to find a substitute that would provide a decent dose of protein, I tried several methods of making coffee creamer from soymilk, but none of them worked very well. 

So far, the best compromise I've found is to buy the coconut-based creamer from Trader Joe's, which costs $1.99 per pint, and cut it half and half with soymilk. The resulting product costs $2.60 per quart, and I use about a quarter-cup—roughly 16 cents' worth—per cup of coffee. It doesn't have nearly as much protein as the Silk, but at least it isn't loaded with sugar like some plant-based creamers.

Whipped cream: Buy

Even back when we were using real whipped cream, it made more sense to buy it than make it for everyday use. If you buy a container of cream and whip it by hand, you have to use it up right away; even if you whip only a little bit at a time as needed, you still need to use it all up within a week or so if you don't want the cream to go bad. The canned stuff will stay good for months, allowing you to use it up gradually. So, while we weren't thrilled about all the excess packaging, we figured throwing away a can every month or two was better than going through a cup of cream every week. And we eventually found a way to recycle the cans, which helped take the curse off. So we would buy cream and whip it up ourselves only if we needed a bunch of it at once to make something like raspberry fool. 

After we went nondairy, we found the coconut whipped cream from Trader Joe's was ideal for everyday use. However, it wasn't suitable for any recipe that used whipped cream in bulk. We tried a plant-based product called Coco Whip and it worked reasonably well, but the store where we found it soon stopped carrying it. 

We made several attempts to make our own plant-based whipped cream from various combinations of coconut milk, aquafaba, and soymilk, but the results ranged from limited success to epic fail. None of them was really an adequate substitute for the real thing. So these days, for desserts that absolutely depend on whipped cream, such as our anniversary cake, we give in and buy a container of real cream. As long as it's only once or twice a year, that's a compromise we can live with.

Ice cream: Make

Ice cream is another dairy product we had a hard time making a plant-based version of. We tried various homemade recipes, such as iced coconut milk and plum whip, but none of them quite ticked all the boxes for flavor and texture. But last month, we tried a version made with much richer coconut cream, and this was considerably more successful. 

We'll most likely tinker with the recipe some more to see if we can tone down the richness a little or replace at least part of the allulose sweetener we used with plain sugar, which is considerably cheaper. But even in its present form, this is better than most nondairy ice creams we've tried. And at around $3.50 per batch (about 1.5 cups), it's cheaper than Oatly or Ben & Jerry's and not too much more than Breyer's.

Plant cheese: Make

Before we went off dairy, Brian and I could usually pick up cheese on sale for around $2 a pound. The really good stuff, like fresh mozzarella, was pricier, and we once attempted to save a little money by making our own, but it wasn't nearly as good as the store's. And since it wasn't any cheaper than the sale-priced stuff, we saw no point in trying it again.

But once we went off dairy, we discovered that a good plant-based cheese was much harder to find. Fortunately, we were able to find an ideal DIY substitute: the vegan mozzarella from the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken blog. It's much closer to real mozzarella in both flavor and texture than any store-bought substitute, and cheaper, too. The first batch we made cost $4.56 for two cups, but we've since found cheaper sources for some of the ingredients, bringing the cost down to around $3 per batch—equivalent to $6 per pound. That's a lot more than we used to pay for real cheese, but a bargain compared to store-bought alternatives like Daiya, which cost over $10 a pound.

Meat substitutes: Make and buy

Brian and I use a variety of substitutes for meat. The simplest one is tofu, which we've never attempted to make ourselves since it's so cheap to buy. It's gone up a bit in price recently, but it's still under $2 a pound, and I doubt we could make it for less than that.

Another commercial product we really like is Butler Soy Curls. These chewy soy strips absorb the flavor of whatever liquid you soak them in, so they make a reasonable substitute for almost any kind of meat. They can replace ground beef in chili, sausage in a savory cabbage dish, chicken in fajitas, pork in a kebab, and pepperoni on a pizza. We buy them in bulk from the manufacturer for $6.47 a pound, which works out to about $2.15 for a pound of rehydrated, cooked curls. Not many real meat products can beat that price.

We used to buy commercial veggie burgers as well, but we never found a brand we really loved. Fortunately, we recently developed a veggie burger recipe that's both better and cheaper than most commercial alternatives. Our grill-friendly mushroom seitan burgers have a savory flavor and a hearty, chewy texture that we actually prefer to Impossible Burgers, and at roughly 70 cents per patty, they're less than one-third of the price.

Sadly, there's one meat product we've never found a decent substitute for: sausage. We used to really love the free-range pork kielbasa from the Amish market, and we've never found a vegetarian version that could come close to it. We tried one recipe that billed itself as "The World's Best Vegan Sausage," but it turned out to be disappointingly dry. And while the Impossible Brat proved to be spot-on in terms of texture and, according to Brian, flavor as well, I discovered that I apparently don't care much for bratwurst. So, in this one area, neither making nor buying has proved satisfactory, and our search continues.

Pasta: Make and buy

For the most part, Brian and I are perfectly happy to buy our pasta at the store. We don't own a pasta machine, and the one time we tried rolling it out by hand, it was a huge amount of work and came out lumpy. For something you can buy for $1 a box, it just doesn't seem worth it.

The only pasta we do make is gnocchi. We used to buy those too, since a $2 bag from Trader Joe's made such a handy last-minute meal. But a few years ago, I learned in a Reddit forum that it's reasonably easy to make your own gnocchi with potato flakes. We tried it, and it was so easy and tasty that we've never gone back to the store-bough gnocchi since. (Brian has also tried making them from scratch with baked potato, and those are still better, but too much work to make on a regular basis.) 

Cereal: Make and buy

Brian's usual breakfast is a bowl of homemade granola. He cuts the sweet, baked clusters with a roughly equal volume of plain oats, making the finished cereal both healthier and cheaper. At the prices we currently pay for all the ingredients, it's about $4.85 per batch, or 61 cents per bowl.

However, he doesn't always have time to bake a new batch of granola before he runs out, so he relies on Kellogg's raisin bran as a backup. It costs $2.05 per pound at Costco, and his usual breakfast is about 3 ounces, or 38 cents' worth, with an additional nickel's worth of oats on top. That's only 43 cents per bowl, making the commercial product actually cheaper than the homemade one. But Brian likes the granola better, so he considers it worth the cost and effort.

That pretty much covers our make-or-buy list as it currently stands. Most of the items on the "buy" list are ones we'd be happy to make if we could find a recipe for a homemade version that was cheaper and not too complicated. But for now, this is what works best for us.