This sounds ridiculously frugal, but if you're hard up for cash but have a freezer and a toaster, then freezing bread and toasting it up again can make some pretty awesome sandwiches. You can also stick really cheap bulk-buy cheese on it and make a mini cheese toastie.
That said, if I were still poor, I wouldn't want to keep my stuff in the freezer at one of these pay-per-minute cafes, because it'd be gone by the next time you got to it. I also assume that they lock up at night, so I'm not really sure how this'd help vagrants all that much.
However, if you happened to be lucky with the other people in the cafe (i.e. no-one being obnoxious or noisy), then it makes a ridiculously cheap coworking space.
Your every day grocery store bread tastes about the same after being frozen, and eaten later on. I know at my parent's place, my mom usually has 5 or 6 in the freezer, because she lives outside of town, so it makes more sense to stock up. I live in the city, by myself, so sometimes I'll buy a loaf, make some sandwiches, and toss the rest in the fridge. I don't mind it a little cold, and it doesn't go moldy before I'm able to eat the rest. If I buy fresh bread from the bakery or market, I just eat the entire thing within a day or two because it's delicious, and freezing would be a sin.
If you were really poor, a bread machine is probably the easiest & cheapest way to make bread. It comes out to be around 25 cents a loaf, and you can control how much you want to make per batch. You only really need yeast and flour. However, the $25 bread machine is a small investment required.
Wouldn't making it by hand and throwing it in an oven be cheaper?
Although it depends on your oven if gas or electric, your time and effort, how much power a bread machine uses. The oven makes bread far better than a bread machine but a bread machine is better than mass produced, sliced, preservative laden white bread.
But you could time it so the bread is baked when the oven is used for cooking supper.
A toaster oven with small bread pans also works great and is more versatile for about $10 more. Among other things I made sweetbread this way for several months when I was in college using instant pancake mix mixed with cracked wheat.
Making your bread by hand is cheaper. And I'd drop the yeast. Just do your own wild-caught sourdough. (You do need salt, however. Bread without salt doesn't really work. And water.)
If you're only optimising for cost, sure. If you're also optimising for effort, yeast is a no-brainer.
The machine is useful if you're not good at/willing to/able to plan a bit. You have to do a number of steps on a schedule when baking by hand, there's only one to worry about with a machine.
I do that anyway even for a single loaf of bread since I hate dry, stale bread. The freezer keeps it fresh and to make toast just throw the frozen slices into a toaster, no need to thaw first.
Yea--I grew up in the "if you want something to eat learn
how to cook Dude". Plus, my girlfriends we so terrible(I think they were rebelling, or though it was cute?)
at cooking. One of the first things I learned how to
make was bread, but it always came out terrible, except pizza dough. I have perfected rice with a steamer though.
Rice is cheap if you are strapped.
Very true. We don't eat enough bread to keep the loaf fresh for its lifetime, and we are then left with chucking bread out.
Instead, we split the loaf and use slices as necessary.
Freeze it, then after a bit of experimentation, you can find the perfect toaster setting to defrost it (and even have it warm) without toasting it. I do it all the time.
What really annoys me is that it's possible to make bread that lasts for >30 days, but they don't due to people's stupid phobias of food treatments. Before I started freezing it all the time, I used to waste so much from it going mouldy, so I'd bet many people still do.
