Compare bakery bread cost against baking at home.
A homemade loaf is mostly flour by cost, and flour is cheap. The costs people forget are the small ones — yeast, salt, oil — and the oven, which is the largest non-flour item for a single loaf. That is why loaves per bake matters so much: an oven costs roughly the same to heat whether it holds one loaf or four, so baking two at once nearly halves the energy attributed to each. The comparison excludes your time, which is the honest reason many people still buy bread.
Homemade loaf cost
Cost = flour per kg x (g per loaf / 1000) + sundries + oven cost / loaves per bake
Saving
Saving per loaf = bakery price - homemade cost
Oven energy is nearly fixed per bake — heating the cavity dominates, not the dough inside it. Two loaves in one bake carry half the energy cost each, four carry a quarter. Batch baking and freezing is the main lever for making home bread genuinely cheap.
No, deliberately. A basic loaf takes 15 to 20 minutes of hands-on work spread across several hours of waiting. Priced at any real hourly rate that would dominate every other figure, so this shows the cash comparison and leaves the value of your time to you.