ANALYSIS: I’ve always been a baker – not only is sifting, melting and mixing a super relaxing way to spend an afternoon, the results are delicious. Why wouldn’t you get amongst it?

But some of my favourite recipes rely heavily on ingredients that are rapidly increasing in price. The cost of butter is soaring, the war in Ukraine is driving up the price of flour, and just about everything else seems to get more expensive every time I set foot in a supermarket.

The pain at the checkout got me pondering – would it be cheaper to make some of our staple foods at home?

After some experimentation in the kitchen and a bit of number-crunching, here’s what I found:

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Whether making your own butter is a money-saver depends on the ready-made options available.

If you’re able to lay your hands on a $4 block of Tararua butter from The Warehouse – something of a unicorn, it has to be said – it’s not worth whipping up your own.

However, if the only butter you can buy is closer to, or perhaps even more than $8 per 500 grams, making your own starts to make more economic sense.

You’ll need about a litre of cream to make 500g of butter. Most recipes recommend using cream with a fat content of 40%, but you can get away with using standard cream, which has about 36% fat.

A litre of Pams cream was $8.05 at Pak ‘n Save on Friday, meaning that on the off-chance no cheap butter was available, you could make about 500g at home for less than the cost of a block of Anchor butter at Countdown ($8.50 on Friday).

Making butter at home also produces buttermilk, which you definitely should not tip down the drain. Instead, use it to make your pancakes, scones and cakes super light and fluffy. Bonus.

Anyone with school age children knows how quickly the weekly bread bill can mount up. If you want your toast and sandwiches to have a consistency better than chipboard, you need to spend a minimum of $3 and probably closer to $3.50 a loaf for plain white bread.

In a house where at least a dozen loaves are devoured every week, that’s about $40 down the collective hatch.

Unless you make your own.

My go-to recipe for a loaf of white bread comes from Simon and Alison Holst’s The New Zealand Bread Book.

It can be made in a bread machine or the oven and has seven simple ingredients – water, oil, salt, sugar, milk powder, flour and yeast.

A 1.5kg bag of Edmonds High Grade Flour was $1.99 at Pak ‘n Save on Friday so the 420g required for my bread cost 56 cents. Carrying on like that, here’s a cost breakdown for the loaf:

That’s $1.25 in ingredients for a loaf weighing around 700g and with Consumer NZ estimating a breadmaker will add around 9c per loaf to your power bill, a grand total of $1.36.

Using the oven will cost slightly more, but we’re talking a few cents and nowhere near enough to make a store-bought loaf a more cost-effective option.

It’s actually a bit ridiculous how much cheaper it is to make yoghurt rather than buy it.

The cheapest litre of yoghurt available at Countdown on Friday was $3.90 on sale, while Pak ‘n Save had a $3.49 offering and shoppers at New World could buy a tub for $5.69.

But it costs just a fraction of that to make the same amount at home, and it’s surprisingly easy.

A note on yoghurt makers: If you have one, it can be a good place to incubate your yoghurt but those sachets of yoghurt base you see in supermarkets for $4 a pop aren’t necessary.

What you do need is a litre of milk, quarter of a cup of yoghurt (store bought plain and unsweetened or leftover from your last batch), a thermometer, a pot and a 1L glass jar.

There are dozens of recipes online, but to break it right down: the milk is heated to 85C, cooled back down to 45C and combined with the yoghurt before being left to incubate.

With a 2L bottle of milk costing about $3.90 across all the big supermarkets, you can make fresh yoghurt at home for $1.95 a litre, about half the price of store bought varieties on sale.