That has not been my experience. It takes roughly 15-20 minutes for my wife (me it is closer to 30 minutes) of actual "mix, knead, and clean the dishes" time.

That has not been my experience. It takes roughly 15-20 minutes for my wife (me it is closer to 30 minutes) of actual "mix, knead, and clean the dishes" time. Our oven uses roughly 3 kWH of electricity to bake the bread (I've got these fun little current transformers on all the circuits in my house, which lets me measure these things). Wall clock time is roughly 2 hrs with two rises but during most of that time it does the work and the baker can do other productive work during that. My wife made a video[1] to demonstrate what was needed. The recipe used in the video makes two 1.5 lb loaves of bread. The cost of materials is about $1, 3 kWH of power is about $0.60 in the Bay Area. A 24 oz loaf of bread at the bakery is $4 - $6 (so $8 to $12 for two), and at a grocery $3 - $5 ($6 - $10). Given all of that; Comparing the marginal cost of using 30 minutes of your time over a span of two hourse at home to bake bread, compared to a trip to the grocery store to buy bread? For the sake of argument, lets say it takes you the same time (30 minutes) to get in your car, drive to the store, pick up some bread, and drive home. You've spent 4x to 10x the outlay, gas + commercial bread price, versus the electricity + materials bread price. So what was the marginal value of that 30 minutes? Let us also assume for the sake of argument that you actually need bread, which is to say whether you make it yourself or you go out and buy it you have determined that it was time to acquire two 24 oz loaves of bread. As you may have guessed, my wife and I have discussed this at length and argued it about six different ways. And for me at least, I always end up find it impossible to come up with a plausible way of monetizing that 30 minutes with a better economic result and still end up with bread in the pantry. I'm always open to discussion of how I could, as a systems guy I find these sorts of puzzles quite fascinating. [1] The wife making bread, note that she normally kneads bread about twice this fast :-) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvBTxvX351U&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvBTxvX351U&feature=youtu.be