This doesn't really scale though, at least not at the costs people expect to pay for flour, and I don't have a solution for that. I'm often paying $2-3/lb when purchased in bulk from my co-op, but in the end I consider it cheap for what I am getting and bread baking is a cheap hobby overall. Meanwhile, you can get white flour from a big national brand in grocery stores for far less than a dollar a pound.
It does take quite a bit of "wall time" to produce a loaf of bread, but very little of that is "active" work: 15-20 minutes mixing/kneading, 10 minutes shaping, plus baking. The rest is inactive time while you're waiting for the dough to rise.
If your schedule lines up, then it's not bad at all. For a while, I made a sourdough that perfectly lined up with my weekend routine. I'd mix it on Saturday night and put it in the cool part of the fridge. On Sunday morning, I pulled it out before leaving to play in a pick-up league in the park. A few hours later, I'd be tired and the dough would be risen. I'd shower, shape it, and run some errands during the second rise. When I got home, I'd pop it in the oven while I put away the groceries.
Timewise, this was perfect. The bigger downside was that my (small) kitchen was always a bit of a mess: flour gets everywhere and cleaning the bowls gunks up your sponge. Still, the bread was delicious!
Before that, I usually baked on the weekends. There is a time (and kitchen space!) investment required for bread, but I enjoy it because it's one of the few ways I get to work with my hands and create something. Otherwise I spend all day working on the computer. Creating physically, even baked goods, is a form of meditation to me. So for that reason I do find it a worthwhile use of my time.
This year I have transitioned to a simplified way of making bread, by baking it into a microwave oven. This is fast enough to allow me to make at home a bread every morning when I wake up, for breakfast.
The active part, i.e. adding the ingredients, kneading the dough, transferring to the oven and washing the vessels at the end takes only around a quarter of an hour. The baking time is perfectly reproducible. It depends on the oven and on the quantity of dough. In my oven I bake a bread made of 500 g of wheat floor for 13 minutes @ 1000 W, in a glass vessel covered by a lid.
It is possible to use a leavening agent for a softer bread, but when baked in a microwave oven even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste (especially if, instead of being put in the baking vessel as a flat disc, the dough is first rolled into a cylinder and then bent into a torus that fills the baking vessel).
The home-made bread, if it is pure, should be eaten immediately after cooling, because unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has a poor shelf life.
Obviously, the bread baked in a microwave oven lacks the crust, but this is healthier and I prefer it that way. Many microwave ovens include a heating lamp that could be used to make a crust, but I have not attempted to make such a bread.
- Before going to bed mix to a rough dough 500 g flour, 400 g water, 8 g salt (50% KCl works fine), 2 g dried yeast. Takes les than five minutes.
- Leave it in a bowl covered overnight, takes the worker no time at all
- In the morning heat put a cast iron pot and lid in the oven and heat to 250°C, takes the worker one minute
- while the oven is heating take the dough and shape it into a reasonably smooth ball, takes about two minutes.
- Drop the ball into the pot, put on the lid, put it back in the oven. One minute
- After half an hour take off the lid. One minute
- After another fifteen minutes the bread is ready. Take it out of the oven and leave on a rack to cool for half an hour. One minute of work
About 11 minutes, certainly less than fifteen minutes of actual work.
If you get some kind of machine to knead the dough you can do it with an elapsed time of about three hours and about the same amount of work. If you devote another ten minutes you can make a batch of twenty good sized bread rolls.
I make bread rolls three or four times a week for a family of four. It's not a large fraction of my day and on Sunday when I am cooking dinner anyway it hardly adds any time at all.
> stone-ground whole wheat flour
This is just one in a sea of examples. A small % of consumers get wise to the fact that hyperprocessed flour that's industrially ground into a fine powder isn't as healthy as stone ground. Food industry responds by labeling bread "stone ground" that has none of the properties that make that make stone-ground bread superior:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneground_flour
> In the USA flour only has to 'pass between stones' once during its manufacture to be regarded as stoneground, and it has been claimed that a significant proportion of flour sold as stoneground in the USA has not been processed in this way, being ordinary roller-ground wholemeal.
So not only is the food industry going to produce a bunch of poisonous/unhealthy crap for the sake of profits that's making our entire country sick, the small % of people who do some research and go out of their way to find needle-in-a-haystack healthier selections are going to be duped as well.