Is it worth the dough to bake your own bread?

THE cost of making a loaf of bread at home (Mail), which came out at £1.85 for ingredients, purchase of the bread maker and electricity, missed out the question of labour — the time spend making that loaf of bread.

People put things together: machines just do the mundane bit.

A person earning £10 an hour who spends half an hour in the kitchen making the bread (before, during and after, the three hours it takes the machine to cook it) increases the total cost per loaf from £1.85 to a staggering £6.85. That’s a lot of dough.

I assume the Prime Minister earns more than that, so the cost of him making a loaf of bread would be astronomical. Come on, economists: what is the cost for our Prime Minister making his own bread? Can we get Mr Cameron baking a loaf on one of those daytime cookery TV shows? (Though that would put the cost up even further with all those lights, cameramen, staff, video tape, etc)

PETER MITCHELL, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. UNTIL recently, I bought two 400g farmhouse loaves from a supermarket each week. Parts of them were thrown away when stale. Two years ago, they changed the recipe for the worse, so I began to research the DIY route. A packet of mix (which makes two 250g loaves) is 75p: 2g is more than enough butter (0.01p) and water (0.003 pence). My bread-maker takes 2.5 hours to bake a 250g loaf — just under 20p in electricity. Total 58p compared with the supermarket’s 70p and no bread wasted. That’s everything bar the cost of the breadmaking machine — which cost me 12,600 points from the Mail Rewards Club! And it may be a coincidence, but I used to suffer from acid reflux — until I started baking my own bread.

P. WILSON, Chester.