Cooking a roast dinner can be a costly energy guzzling activity with multiple pots and pans on the go at once. But instead of cutting down on the trimmings to save money, here’s how to cut the cost of your roast by switching up how you cook it.
Channel 5’s Secrets Of Your Supermarket Shop recruited the help of food researcher Dr Christian Reynolds, who is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Food Policy at City University London. He shared how to save a whopping £93.60 a year by cooking your weekly roast a little differently.
Dr Christian’s tips reveal how you can cut the cost of the energy used to conventionally cook a roast from £4.10 to just £2.30 using alternative methods. That’s a saving of £1.80 a meal.
Energy saving cooking tips for your roast dinner
1. Flatten your chicken
Instead of cooking a roast chicken for an hour and a half in the oven, costing around £1.15 to roast, Dr Christian flattens the bird so that it can cook quicker. This type of cooking is called spatchcocking or butterflying.
Using this method, which involves removing some of the bones to flatten out the chicken, Dr Christian shortens the cooking time by around half. This comes to about 50p to 60p to roast.
2. Part-cook roasties in the microwave
Dr Christian saves 69p by microwaving the roast potatoes for 14 minutes, with a stir at the half-way point. This avoids having to parboil before roasting them.
After microwaving Dr Christian advises fluffing the potatoes up with a shake and giving them a spray of oil. He then roasts them in the oven for 20 minutes.
3. Microwave your veggies
A tray of roast vegetables costs 50p to cook in the oven, on the hob that’s 20p, in a steamer it’s 9p, and in a microwave that’s 3p to 4p. So instead of popping them in the oven Dr Christian cooks vegetables in a bowl in the microwave with a bit of water. That’s an incredible saving of around 47p per meal.
READ NEXT:
