Speaking as the son of a small commercial cheesemaker, who started out (~23 years ago) making cheddar that only stayed good for about a week in the fridge. Now we make aged cheddar.
But its a fun hobby - if you can stand the long feedback cycles.
Personally I'm pretty much only making a sort-of curd-cheese now [1] with left over (sour) milk. Its fast to make, only ages for a couple weeks, and then I use it in a quiche. Which works really well and us more of a way to use excess milk than actually "make cheese".
[1] I use citric acid and heat to separate the curd, then put that in moulds to drain for 2 weeks are do - minimal pressing. Forms a firm, crumbly curd with a mild sour flavor.
I made a large wheel once, and matured it for a year, and it was edible, but nothing special. That's too long for me to get the feedback I need to improve.
Takes about a week, cheap and very easy. A decent kimchi here is £4.50 for a small pot, maybe 250-400g? I can make 2kg+ for less. Kimchi is the only one I've seen sold out of the list too. I highly recommend trying it, if you have a vac sealer it's even easier.
But, yeah, you don't really save money in general and decent commercial products you can easily get many places are as good or better.
There are exceptions. Some bread products (including biscuits etc.) are reasonable to make at home, especially if you don't have convenient access to a good baker. (There are a few in the city but not near me.)
I find cooking in general is rewarding and can save quite a bit of money.
Kombucha is the exception.
I make kombucha at home. The labor is extremely minimal (basically the same effort as making a gallon of sweet iced tea) and the economics absolutely make sense - the cost less than $1 a gallon for me to make it vs $3-5 for 16 oz at the grocery store. Plus I already have pounds of tea at home.
The other reasons I make it are to avoid having to haul heavy bottles into the house and because I prefer unflavored kombucha and only flavored ones are widely available commercially.
Yeah, if you use a lot and are just producing unflavored, kombucha is pretty easy/cheap.
Even making your own yogurt is not cost efficient. It is literally cheaper to buy yogurt than the standard ordinary milk and sour it yourself. Cheese is even worse.
All the weird regulations, price control, quota, duties and import restrictions seem to ultimately benefit mostly the very large industrial transformers, leaving actual farmers with scraps and consumers with ballooning costs.
Mozzarella is made with a sort of perpetual stew at the farm or milk factory, instead of adding a bacterial culture directly to milk like most cheeses.
In the Netherlands you can find dairy farms everywhere, and some of those have a shop with some range of milk or milk products, usually what they themselves prefer the most. They know how it works, so they can replicate it and it becomes no problem.
First there is a floor price on milk. Milk cannot legally be sold below that floor price to consumers.
Farmers are prohibited from selling fresh milk direct to consumers. It's illegal. Period. They can't gift it either. It has to go to a transformer to be mixed with, homogenized and pasteurized.
Dairies and cheese makers, with the proper license, buy fresh milk in bulk to be transformed.
Since yogurt, or cheese, is not milk, there is no floor price. Somehow this often cause the transformed product to cost less than the raw ingredients (milk) that goes into it if you were to purchase that milk as a consumer.
And of course, you can only buy pasteurized, homogenized milk, which is an entire other problems.
This is the case in Quebec, Canada. Other provinces have different but similar laws. The dairy industry is the only one that is protected in such a way, hence why OP commented how crazy the industry is here, as nothing else work that way.
Don't make it sound difficult to bootstrap. You can just use some chickpeas or chilli crowns.
Milk is about £0.64/l, so roughly equivalent if you add in the cost of heating it.
However, the price for live yoghurt is a different story - much more expensive, which is why I have recently started making my own.
The cheapest yoghurts have all a very bad taste and consistency in the mouth while those you will do at home taste on par with those you pay a premium for.
UHT is usable, and doesn't need to be boiled, but for that added convenience it costs nearly twice as much.
Tip for UK readers: You can put an unopened 4pt plastic milk bottle in the freezer and it will keep as long as UHT. Defrosts in a few days in a fridge. (Was handy during COVID lockdowns)
* don't do the initial step where you almost boil the milk
* dissolve the powdered milk and starter yogurt using one of these [1]
* make the yogurt directly in the boxes ("tupperware") you'll be storing it in
* make large batches
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sch%C3%BCttelbecher...
You can’t buy 1 gallon/4 litres of yogurt for $5 as far as I can tell. Maybe there is an angle I’m not aware of.
Plus you can be free of all the preservatives.
This is the speech of a scaremonger: You might not be trying to scare folks, but you've certainly bought into it. Preservatives cut down on food waste and are an overall good for society. More folks would starve without these and more folks would wind up with foodborne illnesses.
I'll mention that salt and sugar are preservatives, we've just found better methods now. Are all of them good? Nope, but food preservation was never perfect. That doesn't make it worse now.
No fearmongering intended.
There’s lots of natural preservatives. But we know that’s not always the case with most commercial options.