If that was my thing, I'd probably start at a Kosher/Jewish bakery.

Unless you have a way to get them fresh (i.e., baked that morning) from a proper bakery - you're going to be hard pressed to find much in the bread aisle at a regular supermarket. Or even their "bakery", to be honest. Real bread without the crap goes stale much faster (and costs more) - which is why they doctor it so much to begin with. Even the bakery at my local HEB (I just checked) uses use a palm and/or soybean oil in the "French Bread" baguettes they bake each day.

Honestly it's worth the one-time investment of effort, to learn how to bake a basic bread (form it into a loaf for sandwich bread, make burger buns with it, etc). I haven't bought bread at the store in years. A bog standard white bread takes me all of ~3 hours (max) start to finish, and most of that is just waiting for it to proof and bake. The active time on it with me in the kitchen (including cleanup), might be all of 20 minutes. Generously.

Once you learn how to do it and control all of the variables (and were mindful enough to write it all down), it's basically paint-by-numbers after that - especially if you own a stand mixer. I'm on autopilot when I bake a loaf, or make burger buns.

It's only "work", and it only feels like "effort", when you're learning how to do it for the first few times. After that, you're on cruise control. Worth thinking about, anyway.

Beyond that, best I can suggest is to just find an actual bakery. A good one near me charges about $7/loaf for a regular sandwich or sourdough loaf. I might have ~$1.50 worth of ingredients in mine. It's not really worth calculating it out.

Before commercial yeasts were available at the turn of the last century, we used to just call that "bread".

If you don't bake the buns at 450+ like you would a "normal" sourdough, you'll get a more traditional bun crust texture instead of the hard crusty variety. And if you shorten the ferment time (and don't do an overnight cold ferment), it won't be as "sour" as a "normal" sourdough bread, and will just be a (much improved) version of ye olde white bread burger buns.

Basically, just adapt your bread recipe to use a sourdough starter, instead of your normal Fleischmann's.

I suppose I could, but it's not appreciably different than a gazillion enriched white bread recipes on YouTube (especially if you want to see what it looks like at each stage). I do own a KitchenAid stand mixer, so I've kind of got it "paint by numbers" style when I make it - the recipe and my steps are almost robotic. It's extremely consistent and repeatable in my kitchen, which is why I do it that way.

But if you really want, I can post it up. I'm in the middle of making dinner right now, but I can toss it up later. It's nothing super special.

$7/loaf. Ouch.

Marketing, shipping and labor?

(It is a good quote, that I like)






8 buns, and a loaf. This was about $3 worth of ingredients, and a Saturday morning.

Bread Flour, water, milk, egg (buns only), sugar, butter, salt, yeast. Nothing weird. Could have been slightly cheaper still, but I'm really partial to King Arthur flours. Could even eliminate the sugar.