Everyday Foods That Are Cheaper To Make Than Buy

I love this post! We always make our soups from scratch. It's healthier that way and we don't really want our son consuming soups from packs or cans. I love making pumpkin soup, avocado cold soup and potato soup. My son loves all of these and he can get by eating just soups like this and rice!

I also know that yogurt is quite easy to make. I think mayonnaise can also be made from scratch too! Sometimes we make our own tomato sauce or just use fresh tomatoes on some meals. Nothing beats fresh fruits and vegetables anyway!

 

A friend of mine fries her own tortilla chips as well, instead of buying them already cooked by the bag. Some of our grocery stores around here sell large bags of the uncooked corn tortillas, which all you have to do is cut them into quarters and drop them into some hot oil in batches. I'm not totally sold though on how much she is actually saving by doing so though. The bag of uncooked corn tortilla's is like $1.50 and there is a large stack of them, at least 100 or so I would guess, so it makes a ton of chips. But she is also using a lot of oil between cooking each batch, so I guess it also depends on how many bottles of that she is going through.

Some things I often throw together from other ingredients in my fridge are tartar sauce, thousand island dressing, and teriyaki sauce. There is really no need to buy these things pre-made, and have them sitting around in your fridge indefinitely before they go bad and wind up being tossed. I don't personally use these things frequently enough to warrant buying them on their own. Teriyaki for example is basically just soy sauce, brown sugar and rice vinegar mixed together with a little ginger and garlic. Thousand Island dressing is just ketchup and tartar sauce mixed together, and Tartar Sauce is just a sweet pickle relish mixed with some mayo.

I also make hummus sometimes as well, but there is an initial investment in some Tahini, which is rather expensive. But a jar of it will last quite a while. I also tend to stick with the bottled lemon juice since it's more consistent in flavor. The fresh lemons can vary quite a bit from being really sour to tasting watered down and weak, which can really make or break the hummus.

 

I make my own chicken broth from left over chicken bones and vegetable scraps. This saves me a ton of money in the long run because store bought chicken broth is expensive. I also make a lot of my own cookies because you can make about 4 dozen with the money you would spend on 1 dozen bakery bought cookies.

 

I agree, making your own chicken stock saves money. I find the store bought chicken broth expensive and full of sodium. I usually buy my chicken breasts bone in and if I want boneless chicken breasts I'll debone it myself and freeze the breast bones for stock. Chicken breasts with the bone in is much cheaper to buy than boneless skinless ones. Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself. Once I've got a large bag of chicken bones I'll make a large pot of chicken broth. Then I'll make soup with the stock and keep the rest to use when needed. I like to make my rice using chicken stock too.

 

I have recently gotten into making my own beef and chicken stock. It is definitely a huge savings from the crazy prices at the grocery store, but I also think it just tastes better... and I've read tons of health benefits of bone broth, so I'm all for that too.

I know it is cheap to make hummus, but I just don't like it homemade as much as the store-bought stuff, so that's one I won't make from scratch.

Definitely do most of my own soups, as they are a million times tastier and cheaper.

Homemade pizza is one thing that is actually a lot more expensive to make from scratch than the deals you can get at a pizza place. I like homemade pizza quite a bit, but Papa John's BOGO is unbeatable for the price.

 

The only contribution I can make to this thread is spaghetti. Even in the cheapest fastfood, spaghetti is expensive. We already did a computation on that. Although it's not easy to cook spaghetti, we sometimes cook in volume that we keep in the fridge to be eaten within the week (storing cooked food for more than 1 week is not a good idea).

 

I don't know how to cook, but these foods seem quite easy to make, so I will bookmark this page. I actually always buy waffles whenever I happen to pass by a waffles stall in the mall.

 

Making food from scratch is very satisying, as it does save money and is healthier, because you're not adding all of the extra preservatives. I make most of our family meals from scratch. Another cost-saving item that I have learned to make that is super cheap and easy is cooked beans. Dried beans are definitely cheaper when comparing the unit price compared to canned beans at the store. I purchase bulk bags of dried beans and cook them on low in the crockpot, put them in jars or Ziploc bags and then freeze them for easy additions to soups, chili, etc. I also make my own "refried" beans in the crockpot with dried beans. One item I wish I had more time to make from scratch at home is homemade bread. I usually make quick breads such as banana bread or biscuits, but I don't usually have time to make regular white or whole wheat loves of bread.

 

I make my own hummus all the time if I want some hummus.
I also roast chickpeas instead of buying roasted peanuts to eat in a similar way. I add a little bit of spice to them (cumin is my favorite but I like just about anything on them!).
I also always make my own apple pies. I don't see the point in buying the shop bought ones when they're so easy to make, and tastier from fresh apples as well. And as I have an apple tree this makes it even cheaper.
I always make my own cakes as well, although this is partially due to food allergies making it astronomically expensive to buy ones I can eat from the store.

 

Meals like pasta are definitely not worth it to buy frozen in ready packs. It is so fast and easy to prepare pasta, it's just not worth it. I always buy pasta and sauce, and then will put on some stuff like spices and condiments on my sauce to make it a little bit different. I definitely would not even know how to start making pasta from scratch, but just buying the dry pasta is a huge savings compared to frozen ready pasta.

 

Gravy. Granted gravy may not seem terribly expensive, at around $1.50 a jar, but you can make it from scratch for a fraction of the cost with just some soup base, corn starch and some water. You can even use a higher quality soup base in place of bouillon cubes or powder - such as the Better Than Bouillon brand soup base. Let's assume you pay $5 for the jar of it, which makes 36 cups of broth, you would use about two cups of broth which comes out to about 25 cents. Other than that a few tablespoons of corn starch, which costs pennies, and a couple cups of water. The savings add up too - 36 jars of gravy would run you over $50, the equivalent made at home with soup base and corn starch would cost you $9.

Bechamel Sauce. This is a great base for any sort of cheese sauce you might be buying per jar, such as alfredo sauce or cheddar cheese sauce in a jar. You only need a little flour and butter cooked down in a pan until it foams up and is mixed together thoroughly, then add in cold milk and keep whisking over medium low heat until it thickens. I use a ratio of about 1 tablespoon of flour and butter per cup of milk. Don't use skim milk either, try to stick with at least 2%. To make a cheese sauce simply stir in some shredded or grated cheese of choice as soon as the sauce is thickened to your liking. Take the pan off the heat too before adding the cheese. You want it to melt in gradually, and don't over mix it, this will help minimize any separation of the cheese and graniness. A slice or two of American Cheese also works wonders to get a smooth sauce, especially if you are trying to melt sharp cheddar into it, which often becomes grainy otherwise.

One of the suggestions on the original list I would somewhat disagree with would be the Guacamole. I suppose it depends on where you live, but buying fresh avocado's where I live is really hit or miss. Not to mention they are expensive, so if you get a few bad ones, you've already spent more than just buying it pre-made in the store. Although I did notice that GFS Food sells already peeled and pitted frozen avocado's. I haven't tried them yet, but they all looked bright green in the bag with no blemishes or browning. I would imagine they should hold up well to freezing since they are basically just a fatty fruit.

 

Soup is the one I like making from scratch the most as opposed to buying canned or instant counterparts. First off, those products are usually very expensive and not at all healthy, and making one big pot at home and just separating them into individual portions isn't too much effort at all. I usually do this and whenever I cook a big pot I always have soup for months and reheating is even a lot easier than making something from instant packs or canned soups. I usually just put the container in the microwave and go about my business as usual while it heats up, whereas I'd have to watch over the instant soup if I opted for that. Variety isn't too much of a problem either since I usually make multiple types to stock.

 

I don't understand why anybody would buy a salad bowl when you could make it much more cheaply by adding the various ingredients together in the bowl and doing it yourself. The mark-up on those boxes are horrendous, yet so many people still decide that they should buy them. Instead, they should buy fresh ingredients and make salads from their favourite parts rather than wasting so much money.

 

Tell me about it. There were a number of times I would go grocery shopping with some friends of mine, and we would initially have plans to go grab some lunch or dinner somewhere afterwards, and someone in the group would suggest that we instead just all get a salad from the salad bar in the grocery store instead. I guess they were assuming it would be cheaper to do that, than go to some restaurant and order a salad. Of course, once they piled everything on to their salad and got to the cashier, where it was charged by the pound, they got some serious sticker shock when their salads wound up costing over $10, $12 or more.

Some money saving web sites I read have suggested various strategies on how to save money at the grocery store salad bars, by avoiding items that are too heavy. I guess this makes some sense to the extent that you don't want to be throwing cheap but water dense items into your salad, which are going to drive up the costs. But at the same time, if you are only picking light and less substantial ingredients, your salad isn't going to be very filling either. There's really not much of a way to get around it, they are grossly over priced to begin with for the sake of convenience. Not to mention, it wouldn't surprise me in the least of most of that stuff in there was vegetables that were going bad to begin with.