Give Us This Day Our Daily (Artisanal) Bread (Deal)

Math, Wrath, and a Giveaway Path

Here in the Mini Apple, I am blessed/cursed to live within spitting distance of some of the best bakeries in the city. Blessed for the obvious reasons, cursed by such unseemly matters as “general yet lackluster desire to limit sugar intake for health reasons” and “limited disposable income due to horrifying enraging childcare costs.” When it became clear that Ben and I were spending more money on artisanal bread than on car insurance, it occurred to us that this might be the belt to proverbially tighten. “I’ll miss you, giant challah,” I murmured to Sun Street Breads. “Farewell, $8 multigrain loaf,” I said sadly as we strolled by Patisserie.

Patisserie 46’s truly grainy multigrain

I resigned myself briefly to hard, squat, affordable pucks with sell-by dates three months in the future until revelation hit me like Buddha under the bodhi tree: I could bake our artisanal bread myself! I’d long been a hobby baker, foisting giving breads and cakes and cookies to loved ones around holidays and birthdays and sometimes just for fun. So sometime around the first of January, when Ben went back to work and half of America swore off carbs, I strapped the baby to my chest and got to work, making loaf after loaf of oatmeal, whole wheat, and no-knead breads to eat and/or store in the chest freezer. It felt v Ballerina Farm, v Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I did not feel oppressed because I was enjoying myself, particularly when the loaves came out like this:

BEHOLD

Yet recently — around the time I forgot about bread I’d been proofing overnight and it turned into a giant communion wafer — I began to wonder about the true cost of this artisanal bread I was baking versus its $8-$9 counterparts. (Cut to long screed about feeling eternally stuck under the patriarchy’s thumb, women’s unpaid domestic labor incl. but not limited to emotional and physical and mental and spiritual, the fetishization of female sacrifice, etc. FIN!) I haven’t done math since AP Calculus, but I did get a 5 on the exam (not a humble brag, just the regular kind, albeit 20 years past its sell-by date), and I do have a newsletter devoted to parsing deals of all kinds. So what do you think, dear reader? Should we run the numbers?

putting the flat in inadvertent flatbread

Based on the roar of the crowd (in my head), I say we run the numbers!

So. The ingredients in the above bread are simple: yeast, flour, salt, water. Let’s forget about the water, since that seems dumb/hard, and I don’t remember our utility login. The price of the other ingredients are as follows:

Kosher Salt: $2.29/ 1lb or 32 TBSP

Yeast: $9/ 8oz or 48 TSP

Organic Flour: $1.18/ 1lb or 3 1/3 C.

And the no-knead bread recipe I’ve been using calls for the following proportions:

Kosher Salt: 2 TSP, or 14ish cents

Yeast: 1/4 TSP, or 5ish cents

Flour: 3 1/3 C., or $1.18

At $1.27, this is a shockingly cheap loaf! But let’s factor in labor, shall we? It’s a p hands-off recipe, so I would say my hands-on time is maybe 30 minutes, or $7.50 according to the city’s minimum wage. $7.50+$1.27=$8.77 which is…drumroll please…THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT WE WERE SPENDING ON A LOAF OF ARTISANAL BREAD! How absurd! How great! How stupid! What does this mean for the future? I don’t know! Should I quit baking bread? I don’t really want to! Why? Because I like it! But um, wow, it is not nearly as good of a deal as I thought, IF you factor in my labor, which, let’s be honest, I RARELY NEVER OCCASIONALLY SELDOM DO — not just domestically, but in my writing life as well. Is there a solution for this? Dear readers, you tell me! It would all be so clear cut and Betty Friedan, but for the fact that I would gladly bake bread and write novels for free (shhh, don’t tell my agent or my publisher that) because, um, it’s fun, and I like fun more than I pretty much like anything.

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And now, some deals for you!

° My new mom friend, Doris, runs a cottage bakery, Top Crow, just down the street from me. I have tasted her goods and they are INCREDIBLE. Minneapolitans, use the code SPRING24 for $5 off your order of $25 or more!

° Flower Bar in Uptown has a lil deal going — say the secret code “Happy Flowers” at checkout and get 20% off!

° My wonderful publicist Martin and marketing doyenne Liz have just shipped me THIRTY EXTRA GALLEYS OF BIG IN SWEDEN leftover from our giveaways. Do you or someone you love need a novel shaped like a hug? Reply to this email, and I will send the first THREE readers a copy!