The Autumn Batch Bake That Made Me Actually Cost My Sourdough (And the Number That Stopped Me Cold)

There is something about October that makes you want to bake more and think less. The light goes early, the kitchen smells like warm toast before eight in the morning, and a tin loaf cooling on the rack feels genuinely satisfying in a way that a summer flatbread never quite manages. It is a slower, heavier, more deliberate kind of baking. And this year, that slower pace made me do something I had been quietly avoiding for months: work out what my bread actually costs to make.

I had been baking a batch of four sourdough sandwich tin loaves every other weekend, mostly for friends and a couple of regulars who had started pressing cash into my hand at the door. Nothing formal. Just bread. But once people are paying for it, even informally, the question starts nagging at you: am I charging enough to cover what I am spending? I finally sat down with the Costing Calculator on a Thursday evening with a flat white and an October playlist, and the number it came back with was enough to make me put the mug down.

The Bake: Four Sourdough Sandwich Tin Loaves

This is a straightforward bake on paper. A sourdough sandwich loaf is not as dramatic as a boule or as fussy as a baguette, but it is genuinely useful bread. Dense enough to hold up to a proper filling, open enough to not feel like you are eating paving slab. My formula for each loaf runs like this, scaled to a single tin:

• Strong white bread flour: 400g
• Whole wheat flour: 100g (adds depth and a gentle nuttiness that works well in October)
• Water: 375g
• Active sourdough starter: 100g
• Fine sea salt: 10g
• Extra virgin olive oil: 15g (helps the crumb stay tender for longer, which matters if these are going to someone else's house)

Four loaves, so multiply everything by four. Total flour across the batch: 2,000g. Total water: 1,500g. Total starter: 400g. That is a substantial bake, and when you start listing out the ingredients at scale, the costs add up in ways you genuinely do not feel when you are just reaching into the cupboard one bag at a time.

Putting the Numbers In

The Costing Calculator asks you to enter each ingredient, its quantity, and what you paid per kilogram (or per unit, for things like oil). I went through my last shopping receipts and my usual flour supplier invoice and entered everything honestly, including the olive oil, the salt, and a fair allocation of the starter (which costs something to maintain, even if most people forget to account for it).

Here is roughly what I entered for the full batch of four loaves:

• Strong white bread flour, 1,600g at £1.85/kg: £2.96
• Whole wheat flour, 400g at £2.10/kg: £0.84
• Water (filtered, I factor in a token amount for the filter cartridges): £0.04
• Sourdough starter, 400g at an estimated maintenance cost of £0.90/kg: £0.36
• Fine sea salt, 40g at £2.40/kg: £0.10
• Extra virgin olive oil, 60g at £6.80/kg: £0.41
• Energy: I added a flat £0.55 per bake session based on my oven's wattage and typical bake time (around 45 minutes per tin at 220°C, staggered across two sessions)
• Packaging: four paper bags I buy in bulk, approximately £0.18 each: £0.72

What I Actually Did With That Number

First, I felt a bit sheepish. I had been vaguely proud of what felt like generosity, pricing low to keep it approachable. But there is a difference between choosing to price low and not knowing what things cost. The calculator did not tell me what to charge. It just made the actual picture clear, which is all you can ask of any tool.

Second, I looked at where the costs were going. Flour was the biggest single line, which is obvious but useful to see laid out. The whole wheat flour cost more per kilogram than the white, and it only makes up 20% of the formula. Not a problem for four loaves, but worth knowing. The olive oil was a quiet surprise: small by weight, but the price per kilogram meant it was contributing more than the salt. And the energy cost, once I actually ran the numbers on my oven's draw, was higher than I had assumed. Staggered baking sessions because I only have two tins meant the oven was running for nearly two hours across the day.

I bought a second pair of loaf tins. Baking all four in one session cut the energy cost almost in half. That single change saved about £0.25 per batch, which sounds trivial until you multiply it over a year of regular baking.

The Bake Itself: A Quick Walkthrough

Once the numbers were sorted, the bake itself was a good one. October kitchen temperatures were sitting around 19°C in my flat, which is actually pretty ideal for a longer, slower bulk. I mixed the flour and water first and left it covered for forty minutes while I went for a walk to clear my head after staring at spreadsheets.

After adding the starter, salt, and olive oil, I worked through a series of folds over the next three and a half hours, maybe four sets total spaced about forty minutes apart. There was a moment around the second fold where the dough went from feeling a bit rough and uncooperative to genuinely silky, which is always satisfying. Bit like debugging a function and watching the tests go green one by one.

After the bulk, I pre-shaped loosely, rested for twenty minutes, then shaped each piece into a tight cylinder and loaded it into a greased tin. All four went straight into the fridge overnight, covered with cling film, to proof slowly in the cold. The next morning I pulled them at about 7am, let them sit on the counter for an hour while the oven came up to temperature, then scored down the centre of each with a razor blade and loaded them in at 220°C, two tins per shelf, with a tray of boiling water on the base of the oven.

After twenty minutes I pulled the water tray and dropped the temperature to 200°C for another twenty-two minutes. The loaves came out with a good split along the score, a rich brown crust, and that hollow knock on the bottom that tells you everything is right.

Scaling This Up: Where It Gets Interesting

Four loaves is a reasonable home batch. But a few people have asked if I would do eight or twelve on a regular basis, which would push this into a different category entirely. At that scale, the costing picture shifts again: bulk flour pricing changes the per-kilogram rate, energy cost per loaf drops because the oven is working more efficiently relative to output, but packaging and labour scale more linearly.

If you are baking at that level regularly, the kind of batch reporting and cost tracking that DoughRise Bakery handles starts making genuine sense, especially if you have a small team involved. Commercial batch scaling, bakery cost reporting, and the ability to share access with up to five team members means the numbers stay visible and consistent across everyone working on the bake, not just living in one person's head.

I am not there yet. Four loaves every other weekend is where I am right now, and that is fine. But running the Costing Calculator made me realise I was closer to crossing a meaningful threshold than I thought.

What the Autumn Bake Taught Me

There is a reason this kind of accounting feels uncomfortable. Baking started as something personal and pleasurable, and putting a price on it feels like it changes the relationship. But costing a bake is not the same as commercialising it. It is just knowing. And knowing lets you make actual decisions rather than vague ones.

I raised my price to £4.50 a loaf for my regulars. Nobody flinched. One of them said it was still less than what she paid at the farmers' market on Stoke Newington Church Street, which made me laugh and also made me feel slightly better about the whole thing.

The loaves are still the same loaves. The October kitchen still smells the same. I just understand what is going on in it a bit more clearly now.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by Tommaso Urli on Unsplash