Again, I can’t stress enough that you must drop recipes for the vast majority of your home cooking. Haphazard use of recipes is highly risky to your food budget. When one uses a recipe, they typically don’t have all of the ingredients that the recipe calls for and, therefore, they feel it necessary to go out and buy more food. This is unnecessary. You can easily produce a very similar, even a much better dish than the one in your recipe book, if you have a firm understanding of, and practice in, various cooking techniques.
Below, we have a fictional example of receipts and of prices, but it serves as a guide for how to cost out a dish. We used the conversion tables above to change the units of measure for each ingredient. You will notice that we round up slightly, never round down, we want to be over-saving not over-spending.
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Using our digital scale, we weighed each ingredient in the recipe’s specified unit of measure. We then use this conversion to calculate the total cost.
| Chicken Stew With Dumplings Serves 6: | |
| Whole Chicken | $10.50 |
| Flour 5lbs | $3.99 |
| Baking Powder 1lb | $2.99 |
| Milk 1 qt. | $1.89 |
| Butter 1 lb | $4.50 |
| Eggs 1 doz | $2.50 |
| Potatoes 5 lb | $1.99 |
| Carrots 5 lb | $2.99 |
| Onions 10 lb | $5.99 |
| Peas 1 lb | $3.99 |
| Celery | $2.99 |
| Salt 1lb | $1.50 |
| The Dumplings: Calculation | Conversion | Cost per Recipe | |
| 2 cups of flour | 1.5 lbs | $3.99/5lbs X 1.5lbs | $1.20 |
| 1 teaspoon salt | 2 g | $1.50 / 454 g X 2g | $0.01 |
| 4 teaspoons baking powder | 8 g | $2.99/ 454 g X 8g | $0.05 |
| 1 cup milk | .25 qt | .25 qt. X $1.89 | $0.47 |
| ½ teaspoon pepper | 1 g | $7.50 / 500 g X 1 g | $0.02 |
| 1 egg, well beaten | 1 egg | $2.50 / 12 eggs | $0.20 |
| 3 tablespoons melted butter | 42 g | $4.50 / 454 g X 42 g | $0.42 |
| Chicken Stew: Calaculation | |||
| 1 whole chicken | N/A | $10.50 | |
| 4 large potatoes | 1 lb | $1.99 / 5 lbs X 1 lb | $0.40 |
| 2 large onions | 1 lb | $5.99 / 10lbs X 1lb | $0.60 |
| 4 large carrots | 1 lb | $2.99 / 5lbs X 1lb | $0.60 |
| 5 stocks of celery | 1 lb | $2.99 / 2(1/2 a head) | $1.50 |
| 1 lb of peas | 1 lb | N/A | $3.99 |
| 1 cup of red wine | 1 cup | $30.00/ 5lt / 4 cups | $1.50 |
| 2 liters homemade chicken stock | 2 liters | previously cost $0.50/liter | $1.00 |
| Total Cost for the Meal: | $22.45 | ||
| Price per Plate or per Person for 6: | $3.74 |
So, we have a food cost for this recipe. Each person in the family will eat a hearty, relatively healthy, and tasty meal for $3.74.
I recently met with my friend who owns a café and grocery store. She is a baker and a master at making pickles and preserves like jam and jelly. Beautiful wholesome foods. We were discussing food and the western diet, and she said that a person may go to McDonald’s and buy some terrible “meal” – a quarter pounder with cheese, fries, and a Coke, for example--and it would cost them around $8. I don’t eat McD’s so I was not sure of the exact price, but I have now confirmed it to be true. My friend then said, “I could cook a great meal for six people for $8.” I know this is true because I can too. I’ve had to do it in restaurants for years; if the customer is paying $5 for a dish, the ingredients in that dish may cost as little as 50 cents to buy. No kidding! So, stop eating out at over-priced restaurants, stop buying processed foods, and start cooking wholesome meals from scratch, for a cost that you can understand and control. It’s easy and you will be richer for doing it!
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