To make or to buy?

Perhaps apropos of the post I made a while back -- "What counts as 'homemade?'" -- Christy sent me this short, fun article from Slate comparing the cost and quality of making vs. buying several grocery-store staples. 

Obviously, homemade bread tastes better than Wonder, but does playing Martha Stewart really save you money? While packaged food is mostly lousy, some of it can be spectacularly inexpensive. Out of work and increasingly obsessed with our grocery budget, I decided to test my intuition and run a cost-benefit analysis on how much I'd save—if anything—by making from scratch six everyday foods that I usually purchase from Safeway and my local bakery.

The author, Jennifer Reese, tried making her own bagels, cream cheese, yogurt, jam, crackers, and granola. Now if she'd just tried making yogurt cheese out of her own yogurt, she'd have been even more pleasantly surprised.

I've made my own bagels and crackers exactly once each, and will probably make bagels again but not crackers.  Granola is on my list of things to try making, someday, so I'll save the recipe she recommends, especially since we love maple syrup around here and buy reasonably-priced Grade B in bulk at our local co-op (what a great place!  Has a nice website too and an online store for, sadly not bulk maple syrup, but other odds and ends including expensive non-bulk maple syrup). 

 I do make my own yogurt once in a while, with a Donvier brand yogurt maker (frankly, the idea of doing it without temperature controls, as she suggests, kind of scares me -- bearing blog epidemiologist, please comment!  Especially on the possibility of using raw milk!  Thank you!)  Jam and cream cheese do not interest me, possibly because I rarely eat either.

Comments

[4ddintx]

I haven't checked out all of your links yet, but want to comment on the yogurt. I've done it without temp controls in non-raw milk--just covered it with a towel, put it on a heating pad (like for ear infections) and covered it with a huge pot for the incubation time.

I've only done raw milk yogurt once (only been getting raw milk for a month) and I used a water bath as per a friend's suggestion. It wasn't temp controlled. I just used my crock pot and checked the temp periodically to make sure the temp stayed relatively stable, turning it on and off as necessary. I intend to try my big electric roaster next time.

So, I did have added heat, but didn't have an instrument that kept the temp constant with it's own thermometer.

Tabitha

[Christy P.]

Bearing Blog Epidemiologist says: 1) While the USDA would certainly disagree with the safety of non-temperature controlled home yogurt making using raw milk, literally millions of people do it every day in India...of course their guts are more accustomed to a greater variety of bacterial challenges than ours. If the milk is properly scalded in the beginning I would guess it should be fine as long as you are scrupulous about clean hands etc. The yogurt culture should be introduced in sufficient quantity that those friendly bacteria completely overwhelm any remaining baddies. 2) I suspect that that author of the Slate piece used pasteurized milk. 3) My dehydrator has a temp control and one of the suggested non-dehydration uses is for making yogurt. Also rising bread dough.