Martin Lewis outlines the best way to cook a meal for less

Martin Lewis, the popular money-saving expert, has outdone himself in 2022, helping millions of Britons to navigate a desperately bleak cost of living crisis with thoughtful financial advice at a time when many are in need of all the practical help they can get.

Bringing compassion and expertise to his appearances on his ITV programme The Martin Lewis Money Show Live, via his BBC podcast, his website and newsletter and through his regular media interviews, Lewis is providing a welcome public service to those struggling to make ends meet.

No concern is too small to warrant his attention and, in the latest episode of The Martin Lewis Podcast, the financial guru revealed an ingenious approach to calculating the cheapest way to cook a meal at home.

Following a discussion about the merits of using a dehumidifier to dry clothes rather than switching on the central heating – in which he instructed listeners to measure the wattage of appliances against an average cost of domestic energy usage of 34p per kilowatt per hour – he encouraged his audience to consider whether acquiring an air fryer might likewise prove cheaper than cooking with an oven or a microwave on the same basis.

“The problem with the equation for heating equipments is an oven is going to be about 2,000 watts (w),” he said.

“A microwave I believe, from memory… gives you consistent heat whereas an oven is warming up to full temperature and then topping it up so it isn’t running at full power the whole time.

“But if you’re doing a jacket potato for 10 minutes it’s going to be far cheaper than doing a single jacket potato in an oven and keeping it on for an hour and a half.

“However, if you were doing a full roast dinner and you were cooking many of them, that is where it’s probably cheaper than putting five or six jacket potatoes in a microwave because each additional object you put in a microwave, you need to keep it on longer because a microwave just heats the individual object.”

He concluded: “The general equation is: find the wattage of an item, then work out how many kilowatts or what fraction of a kilowatt it’s using, then multiply that by 34p per hour of use.

“If you had a 1,000w microwave and you put it on for 10 minutes, one kilowatt for a sixth of an hour, a sixth of 34p is about 6p, shall we say? So it’s 6p turning the microwave on for that amount of time. So yes it’s a very useful equation.”