Is Baking Bread An Expensive Hobby? Here are some tips to start without the need to break your bank account and start making your own bread at home!
As many who have started cooking as a hobby, find it expensive as some ingredients are on the high price tag, you might be wondering if making your own bread at home could be the same.
Is Baking Bread An Expensive Hobby?
Baking is a hobby that has many benefits, and one of them is to help you to make the best bread for yourself and for your family, but when you’re new to this hobby might be easy to fall to any tip on getting some tools or kitchen appliances that will make it easier for you, then you might find some of these tools are not on the cheap side, so lest talk about how to keep your new hobby safe for your bank account.
Essential Baking Tools
If you ever visit a cooking and baking store, you might be amazed by the big amount of different tools they have in the store, and some of them have a big price tag, but the good news is that you don’t need them all, you only need to have in your kitchen a few of them, and these baking tools don’t need to be from an expensive brand, there are plenty of them from more affordable brands that work the same.
In fact, I could say here, I’ve known great bakers who have just a few baking tools and they can make any type of bread and they never have gotten a complaint from their clients or from their families.
Keep yourself on the safe side of the hobby, start with the essential tools and from there, as you get skilled, you will know what tools you need and what tools are better to get.
Know Your Oven
In my life as a baker, I’ve made bread in a few different ovens, from the smallest oven in a family kitchen to a small oven for an artisant bakery, nothing fancy and not with a steam feature.
In some baking courses I’ve attended, the bakers had the latest oven model that comes with everything, do those ovens make the difference? Yes, they do, it amazing how well a baker can bake lots of loaves of bread in those ovens.
But when you are interested on baking as a hobby, you can use the oven you already have in your kitchen and start from it.
If you attend to a baking course and the bakery teacher tells you that you need a small oven that comes with all the features for a bakery, before you spend a few hundred or even thousand of dollars on it, you need to know if you really need it or not.
My best tip here would be, start with the oven you have at home, there is always a way to bake the artisant bread with steam in your oven and get good results from it.
After a few months, if you find that you are baking often and you make a good number of bread loafs, then you might consider to take a look to some of the small ovens that are made for small bakeries or a family kitchen and come with all the features you need.
Baking Courses
When you love to make your own bread, you might get interested to learn some different and new baking techniques, been there, done that.
A great way to learn more about baking is to sign up for a course, some are on the cheap side and they deliver a good amount of knowledge, some are on the expensive side, and they also will give you more techniques to learn to make different or better bread at home.
When talking about whether or not to sign up to a baking course, my tips would be, if you can afford it without breaking your bank or getting in other problems, a course is always a good way to learn more.
If you can’t afford it, don’t go, save enough and then sign up for it. Baking courses are the best way to learn new baking techniques and recipes.
Baking Bread Ingredients
Making your own bread at home might require some ingredients from time to time that are expensive, unless you bake the same expensive recipes, there are plenty of recipes that can be kept on the cheap side.
Most of the bread recipes are made with regular ingredients like flour, sugar, water and yeast. Some other recipes will go on the second level and the ingredients list will include also butter or olive oil, eggs, and milk, most of these ingredients are affordable and won’t break your bank.
Then, you might start making some breads with different ingredients, walnuts, almonds, jams, cherries, cheese, olives, and more; these ingredients come with a higher cost most of the times, but they will make your bread even better.
When you get fan of these expensive ingredients when making your bread, then your hobby will be on the side of an expensive hobby, but there is always a way to just buy the quantity you need and learn how to buy these ingredients by the bulk and how to keep them fresh longer.
Note: Walnuts and almonds are expensive but you can keep them in your freezer to keep them fresher longer. If you keep them in a jar in your pantry, they might go bad in just a few days or a couple of weeks.
Stand Mixer
I left the stand mixer to the last, as I know this machine can be expensive, from almost $300 to $500, and this is not easy for many, but I can say, this machine is my best help when making any type of bread, whether is a homemade pizza or an artisant bread loaf.
My tip here is, if you can’t afford to buy it now, start making your bread at home one recipe at a time, kneading the dough by hand, if you can save some money, wait for the stand mixer to come on sale in the store near your home and get it when the price is good.
Read also: Why Baking Bread Is a Good Hobby To Try
Is Baking Bread An Expensive Hobby, Closing Thoughts
Making your own bread at home is a great hobby to try, as a home baker for many years, I only have good experiences to talk about, today I keep making the bread for my family and sometimes for friends in a small oven, whether is milk buns or an artisant bread loaf.
I’m actually quite surprised! I have never baked in my life – with a few exceptions of when I was in middle school and it was a requirement for a class, but even then I didn’t make it on my own. If we put it into perspective, flour and water are things that you usually have and can usually keep for some time. It all depends on how much bread you consume, but still it can be cheaper baking your own bread than buying it every few days at the store. Not to mention, if you make this a hobby, you can even profit out of it.
Thank you for giving me a good guideline to save money when trying to bake bread. Each tip you mentioned are very important and what I like the most, you mentioned something is good to do, but if you cannot afford it, you mentioned to save up and continue what you can do now. Like that as many people cannot do expensive steps first and need time to reach that level. I usually baked bread in a pot on hot coals. I am curious to learn some new skills to bake bread. Do you have some courses you can purpose to me join? I will really appreciate your help for guiding me to learn something new in baking.