Saturday, November 1, 2014

Economics of home cooking

Ever think about how much your homemade cookie cost? The engineer in me is really itching to know the ROM (rough order of magnitude) of my hobby.

We can assign cost to the ingredients according to their list price (always round up), for each recipe,  add up the cost of all ingredients. Of course price is subject to change over time, over regions, over stores. We do not consider the waste and spoilage rate either. Our home cooking business is cash flow negative by default anyway, off by a few dollars does not affect the cooking enthusiast.

Labor cost is really hard to estimate. Your time is priceless, so is the joy of cooking, the peace of mind in food safety, and most importantly,  the bragging right on showing off your creation. So let us do not even try.

Here is some common ingredients and their approximate cost that will be used to calculate material cost in my recipe. I will keep updating with new items.


Ingredient Package Price Package Size Portion Cost 1 Portion Cost 2
Cake Flour $2.00 500g $0.004/g $0.44/cup (110.6g)
All-purpose Flour $1.00 1 lb $0.002/g $0.26/cup(128g)
Bread Flour $2.00 500g $0.004/g $0.54/cup (136g)
Rice Flour / Glutinous Rice Flour $1.00 500g $0.002/g $0.26/cup (use 130g)
Granulated Sugar $10.00 10lb $0.004/g $0.80/cup(201.3g)
Dry Whole Milk Powder $15.00 800g $0.02/g $2.50/cup(128g)
Sweetened Condensed Milk $2.50 396g 14oz (1.3cup) $0.006/g $0.12/TBSP(20g)
Butter $4.50 16oz (1 lb) $0.01/g $2.25/cup(8oz)
Vegetable Oil $3.50 32 fl oz $0.004/g $0.875/cup(8oz)
Milk $7.00 Gallon $0.01/tsp $0.44/cup
Egg $2.00 1 dozen $0.17/ea
Baking soda $1.00 1 lb $0.002/g $0.01/tsp(5g)
Baking powder $2.00 8.1oz 230g $0.009/g $0.05/tsp(5g)
Ground Cinnamon $2.50 2.37oz $0.04/g $0.10/tsp (2.6g)
Ground Nutmeg $4.00 1.1oz $0.13/g $0.30/tsp (2.33g)

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