The ROI of Cooking

If I was ever truly honest in that age-old interview question "tell me 3 things your friends would say about you", I would probably have to answer:

1. He loves to cook
2. He's lazy - well, maybe lazy's a little harsh; but he does kinda try to take the easy way out sometimes; and, of course
3. He procrastinates.

For the sake of this entry we'll also add a 4th one - "he's a bit of a number's geek". This, surprisingly, is true - give me an excel spreadsheet and I'll instantly want to "pivot-table" something.... anything.

So it should come as no great surprise to anyone that I've come up with a tried-and-true formula for calculating whether you should go to the bother of cooking something yourself, or just save yourself the grief, head out to your favorite proprietor, drop down some cash and enjoy the time saved.

Quite simply, in my theory everything in the kitchen can be looked at in terms of 4 indecies, each one measured on a scale of 1 to 10. Combine these in a formula and you have, what I call, your Cooking ROI - or a cook's version of the old "make versus buy":

• Cost - basically nothing more than the price to buy something versus the cost to make it;
• Time - the time invested in making something (including prep & clean-up) versus running out and getting it;
• Satisfaction - this one is entirely subjective - what's the satisfaction of having done it yourself (now be honest - include the grief of screwing up - don't forget about the time you tipped the cake tin upside down as you put it into the oven - and factor in the downside of cleaning up the mess afterwards);
• Taste - another subjective one; but pretty easy to measure - does your's taste better than the store's.

Let's start with the basics - all of these can be measured on a scale of 1 to 10; High Cost = 10; Poor Taste = 1: and everyone has their own scale - so some food snob (me, as an example) might say that "anything President's Choice" has a taste index of 2; whereas some Plebian Suburbite who doesn't know Ottawa's best patisserie from a Dunkin Donut's might rank the same President's Choice "Tastes of Okinawa" as being on par with Sushi from Nobu. It's really all about determining your own Cooking ROI.

And the formula is quite simple:

Cooking ROI = (Satisfaction x Taste)/(Cost x Time)

Let's see an example:

The question often comes up in my family about why I don't bake bread.... for as long as I can remember, my mother baked bread... it was obviously a gene that was passed on to my sister, because she also bakes her own bread. But alas, my brother and I, obviously sharing a similar Cooking ROI, wouldn't conceive of baking our own bread. Not that there's anything wrong with baking your own bread - it's just why would you?! At best, assuming you're not living like The Little House on the Prairie, there's a better than even chance that there's a pretty good bakery within a 1 kilometre radius of your house - that's darn near walking distance if you're not from Texas! So let's see how this ROI thing would work for my brother and me:

Now, to me, bread-baking requires a whole lotta clean-up; I know from personal experience as a kid growing up in my mother's house - that seriously cuts down on the Satisfaction index; and as long as you're buying from a good bakery (and not that Ace Bakery stuff that is 50% holes) your Taste index is going to be pretty high. Weigh that against the time it takes to bake and clean-up, and the cost (and here I was pretty generous since a loaf of your best bread is $3.00 at most) and the ROI clearly comes out in favour of buying bread.

Now, I don't want to belabour the point - obviously everyone is different, and everyone has their own personal Cooking ROI. But let's have a look at another one - this one is one of my favorites - your basic Salsa - and here, I won't use your "Tastes of Mexico" salsa, but to be fair, maybe a good one from Frontera Kitchens; - but for me, the result is the same:

And there you have it. Now, I'm not going to trade mark this little formula; this is open-source - my contribution to making life easier in the kitchen. So next time someone asks you to bring desert - think seriously about the time you threw the pastry against the wall in that vane attempt to emulate your mother's apple pie - and get yourself down to The Three Tarts.