1 Yoghurt

If we start from the perspective that milk, in terms of flavour, nutritional value and animal welfare, is one of the things you shouldn’t skimp on, it follows that your yoghurt should be made with good milk. Organic, natural yoghurt costs about £1.50 for 500g (Yeo Valley), and organic, Greek-style yoghurt £1.80 for 500g (Rachel’s). Making your own pot of 750g, using Claire Thompson’s Get Ahead recipe, involves buying a small one (50p, Yeo Valley) to use as a starter for 4 batches, and a litre of whole milk per batch (£1.10, Yeo Valley). The cost works out at 80p for 500g – not an inconsiderable saving. Go the extra mile to turn your batch into Greek style, which simply involves straining the yoghurt – your yield will be lower, proportional to how much whey you strain out, but the overall cost will still make it worth your while.

You save 14p per 100g for plain



2 Granola

The beauty of this breakfast staple is that it is endlessly adaptable to your pocket and your pantry. Using The Kitchn’s excellent ratio of 8 cups dry ingredients (5 of oats, 3 of nuts/seeds/dried fruit) to 1 cup wet ingredients (¼ oil, ¾ sweetener), something similar to Dorset Cereal’s honey granola (69p per 100g) would cost you about 50p per 100g. Look out for good deals at healthfood shops (the “penny sale” at Holland and Barrett, for example) and bulk-buy dried fruit and nuts from Asian and Turkish supermarkets or online wholesalers – and you can bring that cost down even further.

You save 19p per 100g



3 Rye bread

As any budding breadmaker will tell you, producing a loaf as good as a artisanal baker’s loaf is no mean feat. But rye bread is a good place to start: accessible, achievable, delicious and long-lasting. Tim Hayward’s quick recipe will take a few hours and cost £2.50 to achieve a loaf about 1.5kg in weight. By comparison, Ocado sells 1kg rye loaves for £5.50, which is already much cheaper than the prices you’ll see in independent bakeries for much smaller loaves.



You save 39p per 100g



4 Pesto

Pasta’s favoured outfit, generally a basil, pine nut and parmesan affair, can be made with pretty much any flavourful green leaf, oily nut and salty hard cheese, making it another thrifty basic. Provided you have olive oil, garlic, salt and lemon juice, there’s a pesto for every budget. The Kitchn’s winter greens pesto gives you an idea of how to adapt the original: make it as written, and your pesto will cost you 85p per 100g. Replace parmesan with grana padano or pecorino, walnuts with almonds or pumpkin seeds, and kale with veg tops (celery leaves, beetroot, carrot or turnip tops) and you can bring that cost down to 50p. Not to be sneezed at, when you consider that fresh pesto from deli counters can cost as much as £1.30 per 100g, and still cheaper than jars of the cheap long-life stuff cost 53p per 100g.



You save 80p per 100g for fresh tubs



5 Healthy snacks

Health snacks, energy bars – call them what you will, these are immensely overpriced and incredibly easy to make from scratch. The Kitchn have a 3-ingredient no-cook batch that takes minutes to make and can cost as little as you like. The basic ratio is 1 cup nuts, 1 cup dried fruit, 1 cup dates. So a walnut-apricot-date combo will cost £1 per 100g. If you fashion 12 x 40g orbs out of that, you’ll have your own version of the £2 Bounce Balls for a piddly 40p each. Of course, many store-bought snacks boast specialist ingredients that come with a hefty price tag – spirulina, ginseng, whey protein powder etc. But in including a dusting of superfoods, you’ll only be adding 30-40p to the cost of your entire batch. For a batch of macadamia and coconut balls, for example, based on this recipe, with the ingredients adapted slightly to mirror as far as possible those found the Macadamia and Coconut Bounce Ball, you’re looking at a cost of about £1.15 per 100g, compared to the shop-bought price of £5 per 100g. Definitely still worth your while.

You save £3.85 per 100g



6 Jams and curds

Supermarkets can supply you with really cheap condiments. Sainsbury’s Basics marmalade costs just 7p per 100g – a price that’s hard to beat, but it’s only got 20% fruit content. Homemade preserves are on another level in terms of flavour and they’re one of the economical cook’s go-to tools for making the most of a glut. What’s more, the cost of homemade jam can come in lower if you’re willing to while away an afternoon over an epic batch: 4kg of your basic three-fruit marmalade works out at 5p per 100g. By comparison, Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference, Tiptree and Bonne Maman marmalades all cost between 44p-62p per 100g. The trick is to stick to what’s in season.

The same is true of curds. You can buy Sainsbury’s Basics lemon or lime curd for as little as 7p and 18p per 100g respectively if you aren’t concerned about the quality of the eggs and butter involved. Or you could splash out on those luxury jars often found in farm shops (National Trust ginger curd with honey is £5 for 200g). If you make your own with organic, free-range eggs and organic butter it will cost you closer to 70p per 100g. Pass the toast.

You save over 50p per 100g on jams, and as much as £1.80 per 100g on curds



7 Nut milks and butters

Good-quality nut milks and butters are a surefire way to bust the budget, so buy raw ingredients in bulk and start blitzing. Green Kitchen Stories’s David and Luise make it with nuts (almonds, cashews or hazelnuts), water, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of spices (vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon or cloves). Some sweeten theirs with a few dates. So, a litre of homemade almond milk will cost you £1.44 plus the 20p or so for whichever flavouring you go for. By comparison, Rude Health’s almond milk costs £2 a litre. Mixing it with seeds or oats will bring down your cost. Oatly plain organic oat milk costs £1.40 a litre; making your own with organic oats will cost little more than 20p.

Homemade almond butter made following GKS’s basic recipe will cost £1.02 per 100g; cashew butter £1.25 per 100g, give or take a few extra pennies if you like your nut butters salted. That’s half the cost of Meridian’s almond butter (£2.32 per 100g) and 40p less than their cashew butter (£1.65 per 100g). Granted, it will take you some years to recoup the cost of an awfully good food processor or high-speed blender, but still ...

You save at least 3p per 100ml of nut milk and £1.30 per 100g of almond butter



8 Pickles and ferments

Much like their sweet counterparts, savoury preserves, pickles, ferments and other condiments are an excellent way of maximising on the value of an overabundance of seasonal produce. You can make your own batch of River Cottage piccalilli for about 50p per 100g, when the posher jars on Ocado cost at least £1 per 100g. Homemade kimchi is another winner, at about 30p per 100g, compared to buying pots online at, say, Sous Chef (which is where you can buy the specialist Korean ingredients, by the way) for three times that amount. Check out Kylee Newton’s compendium, The Modern Preserver, for more recipes.

You save at least 50p per 100g



9 Flavoured oils and salts

This type of aromatic jar is usually the preserve of the overpriced deli, which is daft, given how easy they are to make. All you need is a bottle of good extra virgin olive oil, or a tub of good flaky salt, and your choice of flavouring. Take your pick from citrus peel, rosemary, sage, chilli flakes, basil, chives, garlic, ginger … The ratios for oil are 2 tbsp of flavouring to 250ml of oil, according to Epicurious, and 1 tsp of flavouring per 80g salt according to The Kitchn. So a 250ml bottle of oil infused with lemon peel will cost you £1.90; with garlic, £1.51 – compared to the shop-bought costs of £3.25 and £2.20, respectively. Similarly, making a 250g tub of smoked garlic powder-infused Maldon sea salt would come to less than £1 per 100g. Sainsbury’s sells Schwartz bottled garlic salt for £2.30 per 100g, while the Halen Mon chilli and roasted garlic sea salt on Ocado costs a whopping £5.50 per 100g.

You save at least 28p per 100ml on oils, £1.30 per 100g on salts



10 Dips

It’s tempting to sneak readymade pots of dips into your basket at the shops but the cost soon racks up. Hummus, guacamole and the like are super-easy and super-cheap to make from scratch. A batch of Felicity Cloake’s perfect hummus works out at around 30p per 100g, whereas your average shop-bought variety costs 43p per 100g. Similarly, Felicity’s perfect guacamole costs 47p per 100g, compared to Sainsbury’s £1 per 100g. Of course, the fun in making these yourself is that you can freestyle with fresh herbs, drizzles of flavoured oil, scatterings of nuts and seeds, harissa, caramelised onions and the like, all at a fraction of the cost of the primped-up shop-bought versions (Ocado’s range of special dips all hover between 70p-£1.50 per 100g).



You save at least 13p per 100g on hummus, 53p per 100g on guacamole



•This article was amended on 17 May to correct the potential savings in making your own yoghurt.