Home Baking Energy Usage

Had a brief twitter discussion with @CBasis:

@tiefpunkt

Even after baking #sourdough bread for a few years now, I f*ck things up every now and then. Luckily, baking in a pot saves a lot of these failure from being total disasters. This one stuck to the proofing basket, only the bottom came out. Thankfully it still tastes quite good 😅

@CBasis

It is a bit off topic … and I have a lot of sympathy and respect for backing own bread. 😋👌 From the ingredients/taste and price perspective I see only positive arguments.

But I am wondering how the foot print regarding energy consumption can be rated. 1/2

Do you know if there is an honest look at this aspect somewhere?

I might learn something out of this when comparing operation modes in IT. (Your own DataCenter / CoLocation / Hosting / IaaS ) 2/2

Besides the energy used for the backing there might be some other energy consumptions to take into consideration, which might make it complicated to get a fair comparison. (E.g. not shipping the water in a commercial bread via truck could be a „pro home-backing“) 💭

@tiefpunkt

It’s funny that you’re asking. First off, I don’t really know. But I’ve been thinking about this as well.

My oven tells me how much energy it uses, and iirc it’s ~1.6kWh per loaf at the moment. It would be interesting to have a comparison to a commercial loaf of bread 🤔

@tiefpunkt

A quick search found that my oven seems to be about average, and also found that “commercial” baking can range between 1.3 - 5.5 MJ/kg, so roughly 0.4 - 1.5kWh compared to my homebaked loaf. However the paper I found does not take into consideration transport and factors …

… while I don’t know how much energy I use for mixing etc.

Paper: >https://researchgate.net/publication/248515009_Energy_demand_for_selected_bread_making_processes_Conventional_versus_part_baked_frozen_technologies> (of course do not search for this on SciHub 😉)

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