Category: Spending

This magnificent sign over a German bakery suggests that bread gives life meaning and this is a sentiment I heartily agree with.

When we returned from our twelve months of travelling around southern Europe in our campervan Mr BOTRA and I had a dilemma regarding bread.  Although there were many things we enjoyed about being back home, we got no enjoyment from eating sliced English bread that had no taste or substance; we had become accustomed to having a bakery within walking distance of any campsite that sold a range of tasty local loaves and rolls.  It seemed in urban Salford the only options for bread were a supermarket or chain bakery and in both the bread was flavourless and insubstantial and didn’t hit the spot at all.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good traditional bakeries in Greater Manchester but these sit alongside a deli, a specialist cheese shop and an independent wine seller in the more expensive parts of the city and were a bus ride away, so didn’t tick any frugal boxes.  One of the downsides of living in the cheap end of town is the limitations of the local shops.

So what to do to get our daily bread?  When we lived in a larger house with a normal-size kitchen I baked bread regularly but in our diminutive kitchen finding the space to knead dough and leave it proving over a few hours is challenging … so my answer was to buy a bread maker.  I was apprehensive about the outlay for something we might not use and to save money bought a compact Morphy Richards model that was half the price of the most popular model; however, I needn’t have worried, I have been using this bread maker at least twice a week for almost six years now and it hasn’t missed a beat (touch wood) and just the paddle and baking tin have been replaced.  This bread maker makes a decent loaf that is flavourful with a good crust in three hours.  Morphy Richards no longer make the model we bought but I would certainly consider their bread makers when / if we have to replace our bread maker.

Of course, Salford has changed in the last few years following the creation of media city and many Eastern Europeans moving here.  I do now supplement our home-made bread with excellent Polish rye bread from the nearby Polski Sklep [an advantage to living in the unfashionable part of town) and we now have a Booths supermarket down the road where we can buy reasonable bread.  Of course, the frugal woman in me knows that it continues to be cheaper to make my own.