Please do yourself a flavour and check the price of flour.
Water is cheap, yes. Salt isn't all that cheap, but you only need a little bit.
> [...] and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.
If you need bread by hand, it's a very small scale affair. Your physique and time couldn't afford you large scale bread making. You'd a big special mixer and a big special oven etc for that. And you'd probably want a temperature and moisture controlled room just for letting your dough rise.
I blush to admit that I do from time to time pay $21 for a single sourdough loaf. It’s exquisite, it’s vastly superior to anything I could make myself (or anything I’ve found others doing). So I’m happy to pay the extreme premium to keep the guy in business and maintain my reliable access to it.
It weighs a couple of pounds, though I’m not clear how the water weight factors in to the final weight of a loaf. And I’m sure that flour is fancier than this one. I take your point—I don’t belong in the bread industry :)
Well, in your case, you are mostly paying for the guy's labour, I presume.
(Similarly to how you pay Amazon or Google etc not just for the raw cloud resources, but for the system they provide.)
I grew up in Germany, but now live in Singapore. What's sold as 'good' sourdough bread here would make you fail your baker's training in Germany: huge holes in the dough and other defects. How am I supposed to spread butter over this? And Mischbrot, a mixture of rye and wheat, is almost impossible to find.
So we make our own. The goal is mostly to replicate the everyday bread you can buy in Germany for cheap, not to hit any artisanal highs. (Though they are massively better IMHO than anything sold as artisanal here.)
Interestingly, the German breads we are talking about are mostly factory made. Factory bread can be good, if that's what customers demand.
Going on a slight tangent: with tropical heat and humidity, non-sourdough bread goes stale and moldy almost immediately. Sourdough bread can last for several days or even a week without going moldy in a paper bag on the kitchen counter outside the fridge, depending on how sour you go. If you are willing to toast your bread, going stale during that time isn't much of an issue either.
(Going dry is not much of an issue with any bread here--- sourdough or not, because it's so humid.)
You can make amazing sourdough at home in a cast iron pot. It requires time, that's the nature of sourdough, but it's not hard once you learn how. I guarantee you could make bread as good or better for a dollar of ingredients!
Wait, what? Salt is literally one of the cheapest of all materials per kilogram that exists in all contexts, including non-food contexts. The cost is almost purely transportation from the point of production. High quality salt is well under a dollar a pound. I am currently using salt that I bought 500g for 0.29 euro. You can get similar in the US (slightly more expensive).
This was a meme among chemical engineers. Some people complain in reviews on Amazon that the salt they buy is cut with other chemicals that make it less salty. The reality is that there is literally nothing you could cut it with that is cheaper than salt.
One way or another, salt is not a major driver of cost in bread, because there's relatively little salt in bread. (If there's 1kg of flour, you might have 20g of salt.)
A comment in adjacent thread above mentioned paying $21 per-loaf! That could pay for the equipment needed to bake a couple loaves a week. You really don't need much besides a normal oven.
Water is cheap, yes. Salt isn't all that cheap, but you only need a little bit.
> [...] and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.
If you need bread by hand, it's a very small scale affair. Your physique and time couldn't afford you large scale bread making. You'd a big special mixer and a big special oven etc for that. And you'd probably want a temperature and moisture controlled room just for letting your dough rise.