Absolutely. Batch cooking is 100% worth it. It gives you a meal plan, a shopping list, a food budget and so much more.
Just last night, I made myself my lunch for the next 4 days, it took me 90 minutes and to be honest most of it was just sat around waiting for it to cook.
So how does it work?
Essentially, batch cooking is simply just making more food, a big batch that you then split into smaller batches. You can freeze most things, you can take some to work for your lunch and you can eat it that night. In doing this you can turn one cooking effort into 2, 3 or even 4 meals, often at a lower cost than it would be if you cooked the meal on 4 separate occasions.
How much can you save?
In reality not much to start with, in fact it almost feels more expensive to start with. Let’s take for example a meal that feeds four people costs £7.50, you’re going to scale that up into a bigger batch, double it and that’s £15. Scale a meal from 4 to 16 portions and suddenly that one meal for 4 goes up to £30 (£7.50 x 4). However, you’re now able to take advantage of scale and the discount that it can provide.
At the time of writing this, Sainsbury’s 5% Beef Mince was priced as follows:
- 250g – £3.00 (£12/kg)
- 500g – £5.00 (£10/kg)
- 750g – £7.25 (£9.67/kg)
- 1000g – £9.25 (£9.25/kg)
A generic Lasagne recipe for 4 people calls for 500g mince so applying that logic to a recipe for 16 people you would need 2kg and using the above pricing it would cost £18.50 for two packs of 1kg beef mince versus £20 for 4 500g packets. A saving of £1.50 on one ingredient.
So back to the point, there’s more money leaving your pocket short term but long term, you’re keeping more of your money.
£1.50 isn’t worth the effort – or is it?
I don’t want you to get hung up on this point but what I will say is that in the example above that’s just one ingredient. I can’t think of any meal that is one ingredient alone, not even chips (unless you want really really badly cooked soggy chips in an air fryer because you’ve tried to prove me wrong). Generally speaking most meals have 4 ingredients or more and you can save on each ingredient by bulk buying. I’ve gone off track a little and now I’m getting hung up on this point.
The real saving is time. By batch cooking you can save yourself at least one cooking session a week. That Lasagne I keep referring to, you cook it once and you can eat it once a week for the next month and in reality you’re just reheating it (it will need freezing if not eaten within 3 days of originally batch cooking it). Let’s just say, you save yourself 1 hour a week by not having to cook a meal from scratch, over the course of a year that’s 52 hours you’ve given back to yourself.
The saving people never realise: Takeaways/Eating out
My favourite part of batch cooking that hardly anyone realises and possibly the biggest saving of all is that by having a pre made meal ready in the house (even if it’s frozen) means that you can avoid a takeaway. Now I’m not saying takeaways and treating yourself is bad but what I am saying is that if you can’t be bothered to cook, you don’t have to but you also don’t have to order a Domino’s either.
Picture this, you’ve come home from a hard day at work and you can’t be bothered to cook, perhaps you’ve got kids or a sport to get to. Housework to do, homework, meeting a friend. It doesn’t really matter what it is.
You’re looking for something quick and effortless to eat so your first step is to mindlessly look in the cupboard for noodles or beans on toast or even worse, crisps. Once you’ve eaten 4 bags of crisps and you’re still hungry the next step is to look on Deliveroo or Ubereats, one things leads to another and you’ve just paid £20 for a takeaway and whilst waiting for your takeaway, you’re eating your fifth bag of crisps.
Now let’s change it slightly, everything above happens until we get to the cupboard. We change the cupboard for the fridge/freezer, pull out that Lasagne, put it in the oven, set the timer and wait. Timers goes off, you eat the lasagne and you’ve saved yourself £20 and 5 bags of crisps.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll slowly be building out my recipes and I’ll be posting them here as and when so keep an eye out for them.
In the meantime, give batch cooking a go.