I’ve written about basic pantry inventories and starter kitchen equipment lists many times in the past for other publications. An entertaining conversation – some would say a healthy debate – invariably crops up but I think that’s a fabulous thing in this age where a vast swath of the population is rapidly losing its food heritage. Some would even say basic cookery skills are in danger, oftentimes for the most vulnerable members of society. Muted by an insatiable processed food ‘industry’, people are forgetting how to cook even the simplest of meals. In the digital age where a few taps on a smart phone can see a convenience pizza arrive at your door in half an hour, the quality of kitchen education is in rapid decline.
Pile onto that heap the problem of food costs. Everyone has to eat and if you can’t make at least some of your own meals, you’re digging a fiscal hole that will only keep getting deeper. Reports are that costs of living are spiralling upward at alarming rates, again usually for the people that can least afford them. Never mind that food you make yourself is usually better in more ways than one.
My food writing has gotten me into the habit, strange as it may sound, of doing a simple costing calculation on most everything I cook. If you make a fabulously affordable bowl of pasta then lump in twenty bucks worth of Parmesan, you’re not really helping the budget much. From a loaf of banana bread to last night’s mushroom and onion quiche, I can with at least a small degree of accuracy tell you how much it cost. Not (usually) restaurant-grade spreadsheets to the penny but a fair ballpark number. I think everyone should do this occasionally if trying to keep a budgetary pencil sharpened. Of course this leads me to once again get on my soapbox about home kitchens having an accurate scale and portion control but that’s for another discussion. If enough of you kind readers ask, I’ll refresh my basic kitchen equipment list in a later post.
I happily admit that I’m the weird guy in the grocery store walking around the aisles with a calculator and piece of paper. No, not on a smart phone. You should too because there’s a whole corporation full of people whose job is to funnel you to the till with more in your cart than you expect. The ‘secret’ layout and designs of markets that gets your shopping juices flowing has long been discussed but none of that trickery can’t be defeated by willpower and a list. I’m told that young children with constantly reaching limbs are your worst budget shopping enemy. Don’t act like one yourself if you need to save some coin.
Bulk shopping if you have such stores in your area can be a wonderful thing but it’s only a bargain if you can actually use the items and amounts on offer. Don’t have a big family? Recruit your neighbours for that twenty kilo sack of rice. Don’t have a warehouse store in your area? Neither do I so I find my local farmers at the end of seasons and learned to can, freeze, and vacuum seal. You wouldn’t believe the sheer volume of pumpkins and cabbage in my house just now.
Sales and ‘loyalty points’ offers are tools used by companies to get you in the door and can genuinely be an advantage if you understand their games. It’s mostly about inducing you with one-trip convenience. For example, you go in for cream on sale but remember you need soy sauce this week too. You save a buck on the cream but pay full price of two dollars more for the soy which means you’re a dollar poorer. Shop wisely over time. “Patience, young paduan, have you must” as Yoda would say.
Similarly, ‘buy one, get one free’ offers irk me no end as a single shopper when a half off sale would do just as well – especially if such schemes contribute to eventual food waste on both ends of the supply chain. If you see ‘buy this, get that free’, really ask yourself why you’d want ‘that’ if it isn’t on your list already.
By all means collect any points a store wants to give you for things already on your list but don’t buy something just because it has some of their fake currency attached. I barely look at the points offers they email me regularly but in the course of my usual shopping otherwise they do pile up over the weeks. In my local store that amounts to a free $20 worth of groceries every other month or so. It’s a nice perk but not worth stocking my shelves with brand name pickles and expensive crackers to attain. And for the love of shopping carts, don’t buy groceries trying to accumulate a free plane ticket somewhere. You’re paying for that ten times over behind the scenes.
Luckily, most grocery store pricing models are well-oiled these days and prices can literally change day to day as the store elves walk around with their hand held electronic gizmos reporting back to the mother computer on hourly sales counts and inventory levels. Almost certainly week to week will see ups and downs in the prices you pay for each item. If you can’t be bothered to remember or take a piece of paper with you, put that damn smart phone you insist on carrying everywhere to good use for once and take photos of the shelf tags every week so you know a good deal when you eventually see it.
I also can’t stress enough that you need to ignore the actual dollar figures and focus on percentages. When you say something is ‘eighty cents’ more expensive it sounds like nothing but if that equates to 30% of the item’s price, it chews up your budget mind-bogglingly fast. Channel your inner accountant and do the actual math. Einstein no doubt was a great bargain hunter.
As you can probably guess after this rant, ‘how do I get the most out of my food budget?’ is a question I’m constantly asking myself. When the topic arose among conversations with my few long-suffering friends for easily the fifth time in as many weeks, I rerouted my thinking about pantry basics to the context of affordability and flexibility. Ingredients that can be used on the cheap in enough ways to keep things interesting. A baker’s dozen of my best ideas follow but of course this is a moving target depending on your tastes and location. By no means is this a complete pantry but if you’re on a tight budget, everything in this list should be on your shelves at home.
In no particular order
1. Tinned Tomatoes
Picked ripe at the peak of season and packed practically in the field, they’re the base for everything from pasta sauce to salsa. My stores regularly discount a 28-ounce tin to under a buck which is the perfect time to load up the pantry. The juice in the tins is a bonus ingredient that can help along rice and beans. I suggest diced with no extra salt or herbs as the most flexible to stock.
2. Hot Sauce & Chiles
A dollar bottle of Tabasco or similar ‘Louisiana style’ hot sauce will last a good long while and give you an instant shot of tart heat. Inspired by Vietnam and pumped out en mass in California, sriracha has a cult following for a reason. There are a dozen variations on sambal and you can get them all even half a globe away in Scotland. I’m not talking about expensive boutique hot sauces here but big workhorse jars and bottles of punch to add to your cookery. Any of the litany of chile concoctions that populate most of the cuisines that inhabit the equatorial regions are great flavour bargains. Even if you don’t like intense heat, there’s one for you that will work by tiny spoonfuls in your cooking.
Bulk fresh chiles of any sort will give you kick for pennies a dish. Learn the potency of each species. In my town, a single habanero will cost me about a nickel and one will flavour a whole pot of stew.
3. Soy Sauce, Worcestershire, & Mustard
Soy is a workhorse in more than just Asian cookery. It adds glutamates which makes your taste buds think ‘meat’ and ‘deep flavour’. There are great brands in every market these days for $2 but if you have an Asian grocery store, spend some time tasting the array of bottles on offer to find a favourite. Both ‘light’ and ‘dark’ are useful but look for naturally brewed versions instead of really cheap ‘soya’ sauces back filled with chemical strangeness.
The list of ingredients in Worcestershire sauce is curiously long (anchovies and tamarind to name a few) but at $2 a bottle this robust and useful potion is something you want to have on hand. It would be impossible to make your own as inexpensively let alone age it properly like they do at Lea & Perrins.
Mustard and its many forms is more than just a condiment. It’s a base for countless other recipes from cheese sauce to (oddly) mayonnaise. Make your own from astoundingly inexpensive mustard seed for a serious bargain but at minimum buy a tin of Coleman’s dry mustard powder and a quality jar of Dijon style prepared for about $3 each.
4. Evaporated Milk, Real Butter, & Plain Yogurt
Dairy can get expensive, especially here in price-fixing Canada, but a cheap dollar tin of evaporated milk can often be used in sauces and baking with even better results than fresh. Conveniently it will last on the shelf for months.
Perhaps the most flexible ingredient ever conceived by mankind, real butter should force out any chemical trickery lurking around your house in the form of margarine or ‘butter-like spreads’. It’s not cheap many weeks but the schedule on which butter factories operate means that about every three months you should catch a real bargain. That means under $3 a pound for us here locally. The trick is that butter suffers absolutely no deterioration whatsoever in the freezer so stock up plenty when it’s on sale. Get mostly unsalted since it’s more flexible but a kilo or two of salted for your morning toast is fine.
Like butter, yogurt is made on a schedule and since it has expiration dates stamped on the pack, it often goes on sale. The tip here is that as long as you leave the factory seal in place, it can last weeks and weeks past that sell-by date. I wait until it’s under $2 for a 750g tub and then get three months worth. Insanely useful in the kitchen, it’s a sauce base, a baking ingredient, and when drained in cheesecloth overnight a tidy little tart cheese. It can replace sour cream everywhere or turn into tsatziki for your gyros and hummus pitas in seconds. Notice that I’m talking plain yogurt here, not vanilla or other flavours whose extra ingredients can cause faster spoilage.
5. Fresh Garlic
A buck will get you three fat heads most anywhere. That’s two weeks of intense flavour boost. The best answer is grow your own from that head that sprouted before you could use it all.
6. Rice, Beans, & Pasta
One word here: bulk. All of these are pennies per pound if you get a 25 kilo sack and they’ll last a year (or two) if stored properly. If they’re in front of you when scanning the kitchen, you’re much more likely to include them in your dishes which is a very good thing. Seek out restaurant supply houses and hungry neighbours to score and share a bargain.
7. Potatoes, Onions, & Carrots
I don’t think any kitchen could exist without some of these three core veg at all times. For the bargain hunter here it’s especially important to do not only the exact math per pound but also to sort out how much you can consume in a given time frame. They can all be tricky with storage (don’t put potatoes near onions, keep things cool but not cold, etc.) but smart shopping takes them from eighty cents a pound to about a dime for the same in bulk. I’d be hard pressed to think of a day I didn’t reach for an onion at the start of a recipe and potatoes of course can go a million ways. In the end, it’s great soup if nothing else.
8. Flour & Yeast
Yes I’m going to tell you to make your own bread again on the cheap but believe it or not, some of the millennial generation don’t have ordinary flour on their shelves at home. Apparently such basic building blocks of food bewilder them when they’ve been raised on microwave ready-meals. That just boggles my mind but even if you’re not up to making your own ciabatta, you need flour for everything from biscuits to gravy. I get ten kilos of our superb Canadian hard wheat unbleached versions for under $7 here which means that pizza crust Saturday night cost me about forty cents.
Yeast in the little packets is insanely expensive. Go to the restaurant supply and get a whole pound of the stuff for about $4. Stored airtight in the fridge it’s good for much longer than it will take you to use. In my bakery intensive life even I don’t go through a pound in under a year.
9. Lemons, Limes, & Oranges
If you’re lucky enough to have cheap lemons, forty cents each in my world, keep them in your house at all times for both the juice and the zest. If not, bottled lemon juice has come a long way in recent years. It isn’t a perfect solution but it’s cheap ($3/litre) and will work most places. I said “most” – there are still times when only the genuine article will do but for baking, cooked sauces, and tea, the bottle is usually passable.
Limes are insanely useful and despite the price scare of years past, come in under thirty cents each these days. Here the bottled juice isn’t in enough demand to encourage improvement so skip those versions and stick with the whole fruit.
Fresh oranges get expensive up north but a splurge on one is worth the zest alone. It can change most any baking from dull to vibrant. And it’s not too bad in Asian stir-fry either.
10. Budget Oils
At minimum you should have a big lug of quality neutral oil (e.g. ‘vegetable’ or canola) for frying and basic uses like making mayonnaise as well as a solid entry in the vast sea of extra virgin olive oil ships that have docked since its rise to the top of popular cookery. I can get three litres of the former here in canola-rich Canada for about $5 with a single litre of imported olive squeezing for about the same. The only caveat with the latter is that quality is all over the map in the budget end of the spectrum so you’ll likely need to taste the house brands in several places before you find a winner. And at that lower price point don’t assume things won’t change with their suppliers over time. In my house when I find a solid performer, I get a case to last me the whole year. And don’t overlook lesser known producers. The global demand is such that many new makers have entered the market and give the old Italian and Spanish guard a run for their olive money.
11. Spices
This is a topic near and dear to my past of course but every house should have the basics. They’re too expensive in the fancy little bottles (and usually too stale) but in the ethnic sections these days you find more and more reasonable bulk packs. Mail order too can help with this budget but remember it’s mere pennies per dish in the end. Every house should have fresh black peppercorn, Hungarian paprika, whole seed forms of cumin, fennel, and mustard, and a goodly dose of cinnamon. After that the only limit is your budget and imagination. And plant an herb garden already. Everyone has at least a windowsill and a few pots.
12. Eggs
Eggs are engineered by nature to be one of the most perfect food sources and conveniently they’re a huge bargain. Protein, lift, and taste galore in a tidy little package. Omelettes to noodles, cakes to quiche, you need plenty of eggs in your kitchen. Even the budget conscious can take an ethical stand here. A truly free range egg will cost you at most fifty cents. A factory (battery) egg is about 35 cents. It’s worth the taste alone to get the better quality. And chickens will love you. Or be like my fabulous neighbour and get in touch with your dormant chicken rancher genes to keep a few birds.
13. Cornmeal
A great multi-tasker, cornmeal can make bread or polenta while simultaneously coating your pork belly and steaming into a sweet pudding. It’s strange to live in a place where such a useful staple is slightly alien to the local cooks but I can solve the price gouging of tiny specialty packets by walking three aisles over to the ethnic section where I can get it for a more reasonable fifty cents a pound. Bonus points if you find its similarly cheap Mexican cousin masa which is corn that’s been nixtamalized and ground as you’d need for tamale and tortilla making.
Honourable Mention – In Store Discounts
Elderly Bananas
For a dime a pound, every grocery on the planet has brown bananas they need to get rid of quick which is conveniently exactly how you want them for making banana bread.
Yesterday’s Bread
Yes you should take the time to make your own bread for the Zen alone but if the local market will give you a discounted loaf for fifty cents, take them up on the offer occasionally. Use it for toast a few days then turn the leftover into rich and creamy bread pudding or whirr the ends in the food processor to make breadcrumbs destined to wait, sealed tightly in the freezer, for a dish of opportunity. Toasted in a bit of browned butter on the stove top with a handful of fresh herbs and you’ve got a perfect addition for pasta or a crispy coating for fish. No bread should ever go to waste in a frugal kitchen.
Prices are Canadian dollars, East Coast as of November, 2016. Your mileage will almost certain vary with your bargain shopping skills.
Note: This is turning into a three (or more) part series with additional posts about personal meal planning and food budget commandments to follow.
