As I posted last week, I’m baffled by the amount that two people in our house spend on food. Then I turned around and spent half of our monthly food budget stocking up for a possible COVID-19 outbreak.
One way I plan to combat this is by making my own ingredients. So far, I’ve just looked at three things that I’ve bought for convenience: Garlic Paste and Chicken Broth. Earlier this year, I started pricing out my recipes like Budget Bytes does, and I was taken aback by the cost of chicken broth and garlic paste in my recipes.
I hated letting chicken broth go to waste, so I would spring for the more expensive 1-cup containers. Talk about additional waste. This set cost $3.99, or about $1 per cup.
Then there was garlic paste. Garlic cloves seemed like a heck of a lot of work. I’d have to peel it, trim the ends, put it in the garlic press, then clean out the garlic press with a knife. So much hassle. These tubes were so much easier, at just $4.49 each. So easy to justify, until I learned that there were only 21 cloves of garlic per tube. That’s $0.21 a clove. In my grocery store, an entire head of garlic is $0.69
Now, I often get rotisserie chickens for convenience, and they come with a magic ingredient for making chicken stock: a carcass. How do you make stock from a carcass? Put it in a pot, cover it with water, and boil for an hour or so, until the water reduces by half. Or, if you have an instant pot, try this method from Budget Bytes. ( I made this with just the carcass, bay leaves, peppercorns, and water, and it was so rich!). Water + throw away bones, means it costs $0.00 for each serving of broth, and I get about 8 cups of broth each time. Way better than $1 a cup!
When I started to wonder if this could hold true for garlic paste, I found out that making your own is a common “trick” among Indian cooks, thanks to My Heart Beets’ Recipe. If you put your unpeeled cloves of garlic inside of two metal bowls and shake them, the time it takes drops immensely. I also used a pastry bag to drop 1 tsp size servings on a parchment lined cookie sheet to freeze them. For $3.45 worth of garlic cloves, I was able to create 54 tsps of ready-to-go garlic paste. That’s about $0.06 a clove.
My hypothesis is that I can save $100 this year by swapping out these two convenience items. Already, with two batches of chicken broth and one batch of garlic, I estimate that I’ve saved $23.06. If I can figure out a thermometer widget for this blog, I’ll include it to track my progress!
What convenience foods do you wish you had a cheaper option for? Let me know in the comments!