Pricing out my recipes

I keep my recipes on the simple side, and, with the high cost of gluten free foods in mind, try to keep things inexpensive yet healthy.  While I have a feeling that I am making food less expensive than the store bought versions and mixes, I was never sure.  So I have undertaken the task of calculating the prices of my favorite recipes.  Bear with me, this is going to take a while, but hopefully this will help us all become more mindful of our menu and ingredient choices.

There were a few interesting discoveries.  Not surprisingly, there is a huge range of prices out there for most of the obscure ingredients.  While Amazon is still a great source for quinoa flour, they can’t come close to the overall savings at soap.com or vitacost.com, especially when ordering in bulk.  (Disclaimer:  if you click on the Vitacost link here and make a purchase, I get $10 worth of products.   But by using this link, you also get $10 off of your first purchase.  Yes, I this means I now technically will work for food.)  Prices seem to fluctuate quite a bit, but check out all three sites before stocking up.  Also, as usual, no online store can beat the local prices for generic bulk foods, or your local ethnic market.  After buying tapioca flour online and in specialty stores, I finally realized its simple yucca flour, which Goya sells very inexpensively.

For my calculations, I tried to find the best prices online for the specialty foods, and just went to the supermarket for items such as honey.  Potato starch was $7.99 for 24 ounces, 22 ounces of sorghum flour was $3.06.  After running the numbers, it seems my cupcake recipe, minus icing, was $3.75 a dozen!  Not too bad considering that a single gluten-free cupcake, full of eggs and rice flour and other dangers, is about the same price.  But then I realized I forgot to add in the price of the vanilla.  Using the price of a 2 ounce McCormick jar ($9.89), the price of my cupcakes jumped to $5.40!  There are 12 tablespoons in the jar, and I used 2 tablespoons for this recipe.  The recipe is still a pretty good price overall, but it’s a good reminder that a trip to Costco to buy a big jar of bulk vanilla is worth it in the long run.

I’ll add the prices to recipes as I go, and post more budget friendly tips along the way.