WB100: How much can you save from home cooking?

Eating out, be it in a restaurant, cafe or izakaya (Japanese: 居酒屋) is often an enjoyable outing compared to eating at home. You save on the hassle of shopping for groceries, preparing ingredients, cooking and washing up the dishes.

Since moving to Japan, eating out has become a pricier affair, no thanks to the inflationary pressures driven by the depreciating Japanese Yen, known as enyasu (Japanese: 円安).

You do not need complicated economic statistics to back up this claim. All you need to do is pay attention to the price changes of restaurant menus.

Case in point, in the past three years a Thai restaurant I used to frequent has made two revisions to its lunchtime set menu: from JPY1,000 (US$6.33) to JPY1,200 (US$7.60) and subsequently from JPY1,200 to JPY1,400 (US$8.90). From the original price, that is a 40% increase.

Another factor that makes eating out relatively more expensive is the Consumption Tax (Japanese: 消費税) differential: eating out attracts the standard 10% rate while groceries and non-alcoholic beverages attract a reduced 8% rate. These little differences add up over time.

Consumption Tax is a tax levied on goods and services. And as its name suggests, it is consumption-based and dependent on spending habits.

Spend more, pay more Consumption Tax. Spend less, pay less Consumption Tax.

With this in mind, there is no doubt that eating out less offers more savings. But how much can you really save? And is it worthwhile?

A five-day experiment

To put this to the test, I borrowed a cookbook from my local library that has multiple, five-day dinner cooking plans for two adults and gave one five-day plan a go.

Each meal comprises one meat, one vegetable and one soup dish, the hallmarks of a balanced diet.

The recipes are designed to be time- and cost-efficient: each meal costing 30 minutes of your time and the total weekly grocery bill (excluding carbohydrates and seasonings) for two adults? An unbelievable JPY3,000 (~US$19).

The cost equates to JPY1,500 (US$9.50) per person for five days' worth of dinner. To put this into perspective, the Thai place down the road charges JPY1,400 per person, per meal.

Putting my skepticism aside, I went ahead with my experiment.

To keep track of the ingredient costs, I front-loaded my grocery shopping by buying all the groceries on a Sunday. As per the cookbook's instructions, I froze the proteins needed for later in the week, as expire quickly.

My total grocery bill came up to just under JPY4,000 (US$25.32): vegetables cost around JPY700 (US$4.43) and proteins (fish, chicken and pork) around JPY3,300 (US$20.90). The most expensive protein was salmon, which cost about JPY840 (US$5.32).

Despite the total bill being over what the book claimed, I was won over. JPY4,000 is how much you would spend per person, per meal at your local neighbourhood izakaya.

Experiments really help you see things through a different lens.

So cooking at home clearly results in significant cost savings, but how sustainable is it?

My key takeaways

From this experiment, keeping the grocery bill to a manageable budget is very doable, provided you are mindful about what groceries you buy and where you buy them.

Vegetables, for example, are significantly cheaper in a neighbourhood vegetable store compared to the supermarket. And the cookbook's focus on using chicken, as opposed to pork and beef, makes sense as this is the cheapest of the three proteins.

To be clear, you don't need to completely forego expensive ingredients like beef. After all, enjoying what you eat is just as important as saving money.

I realised that my expectations on time management needed adjustment, as the book's 30-minute start to finish claim did not materialise. There were just too many ingredients to prepare and cook for. Plus, I am not good at multi-tasking when cooking multiple dishes simultaneously.

For example, cooking a stir-fry chicken dish and a vegetable dish at the same time was beyond me, so I ended up doing one dish after the other.

And as for the recipes, I think using a pressure cooker to make stews or steamed dishes is more ideal. All the ingredients can be cooked at the same time and the cooker can be set aside to self-cook, allowing me to focus on the next dish.

To be clear, eating out is still an activity that I will still indulge in. But from now on, I will be more particular about eating dishes that I cannot replicate through home cooking, for example tempura (Japanese: 天ぷら) or deep-fried foods.

Eating at home also does not mean scrimping on flavour and ingredients for the sake of saving money. It has to be enjoyable, and finding that right balance is in itself a part of the journey.

--Ends