Frugalicious

One of the most expensive ingredients in my homemade bread is honey.  I buy it at Sam’s Club for $11.59 for 80 ozs.  Like most things, the price of honey has gone up in recent times -  it used to run me about $8.50 in the not so distant past (.30 of honey per loaf).

As things stand now, that means that each loaf of bread I make has .43 worth of honey in it.  That’s quite a bit, as I’m always wanting to keep my bread costs down.  I use honey almost exclusively for bread and homemade granola, and once in a while for random recipes here and there.

But then I got to thinking: sugar is sugar is sugar, right?  So what could possibly be an adequate, cheaper, substitute for honey.  Plain ol’ pancake syrup, maybe?

First, I compared calories.  1 TBSP honey has 60 calories, and 1 TBSP syrup has 50 calories.  So pancake syrup comes out ahead in that category, even though it’s mostly made of evil evil high fructose corn syrup.

And what about cost? One gallon of Mrs. Butterworth’s at Sam’s Club is $6.17.  That works out to .05 of syrup per oz (.15 per loaf), compared to the .14 per oz of the honey.

That’s pretty good, but Mrs. Butterworths is probably the top of the line pancake syrup, before you head off into the genuine maple variety.  I think I can do even better than .05 per oz by shopping some store brands.

But of course, all this pie-in-the-sky speculation is one thing, but it’s the real-world application that truly matters.  So I put it to the test.  I substituted pancake syrup in a batch of homemade granola, and in a loaf of homemade honey-wheat bread.  How’d it turn out?

Great! Here are the loaves side-by-side.  Can you guess which is made with honey, and which is made with pancake syrup?*  I still like the honey version better, but the syrup version is tasty, too.    I can’t show you a picture of the pancake-syrup granola because it was SO yummy I’ve already eaten it all.  I am a well-known greedy guts.

(I just have to say here that I didn’t use Mrs. Butterworth’s for this experiment. I used what I had on hand which is a 36 oz bottle of cheap Log Cabin brand that I got on sale at Kroger’s for .99.  That works out to .03 of syrup per oz (or .09 per loaf), so there you go, I have already beaten Mrs. Butterworth’s).

Possibly the biggest objection to substituting pancake syrup for honey is that honey only has honey in it. But then again, I guess if the honey is not organic it could have some suspect elements.   Pancake syrup is made up of lots of unpronounceable ingredients, which I am much too lazy to type here. But it is pretty easy to make your own version out of little more than water and sugar, and whatever flavor extracts you may prefer. It won’t last indefinitely on your pantry shelf in liquid form like the chemically-enhanced store bought versions will, but you can always make just enough for the recipe at hand or enough to just last a week or two.  I have made my own, and it is easy.  Lot’s of recipes call for molasses, but I don’t use it because I don’t like molasses.  But I hear it has lots of iron in it, which is good.

Of course, I could always go to a whole-wheat bread version that doesn’t require any honey.  That would be the cheapest option, but after much trial and error I settled on this particular recipe because both my husband and I really like it.  Like Goldilocks says, “It’s just right.”

Or maybe I could use 1/2 the amount of honey, with “close enough” results?  Hmmm. I need to try that, too.

I’m relieved that this experiment turned out so well.  Now I know that I don’t have to run out and buy honey when I run out of it.  Honey still has a place in my pantry, but I think that I will alternate its use with pancake syrup to cut down on my homemade bread costs.  If I was broker than broke, though, I’d definitely switch to  syrup faster than you can say “broker than broke”.

*Solution to Which Loaf is Made with Pancake Syrup?: The one on the right.