Can cooking with your bed save you money?

We’re all looking for ways to cut our energy bills, but could your bed help? After reading about one journalist using her bed to make rice pudding, I’ve been wondering whether this could be a more general way to save money.

Instead of leaving the pud on the hob or in the oven, she wrapped it up in blankets and left it under her duvet for a couple of hours.

Well I slow cook a lot of the meals I feed our family of four, so I wanted to know if I could forget gas and electricity and just rely on insulation. How much would I save?

I decided to try it out.

Getting hot between the sheets

My husband is used to my crazy money-saving schemes, but as I carefully carried a full pot of minestrone soup upstairs and tucked it up in the bed, I saw a flicker of doubt in my sanity cross his face. Perhaps the teddy bear was a step too far.

However, once I explained the idea he was enthusiastic. In fact, he said it’s the same principal as pit cooking – a way of cooking large chunks of meat by burying them for up to 12 hours on top of hot coals (for the record, I am never trying this out).

It turns out there are even ready-made insulated cooking bags on the market, being used to reduce cooking carbon emissions and help households in the developing world. I didn’t have a bag but I did have a duvet and a never-fail soup recipe.

Once the ingredients were close to boiling on the hob, I clamped a heavy lid on the pot and wrapped it up warmly in bed. I left it there for two hours – the same amount of time that particular recipe usually needs to simmer.

Did it work?

It didn’t not work. At the end of the two hours I certainly had soup and the ingredients were as cooked through – as much as if it had been on the stove all that time.

However, I did then have to blast it with heat on the hob to get it back up to the right temperature for serving.

I’d also be a bit wary about cooking meat this way, as there seems to be a higher chance of the meat staying in the ‘danger zone’ - the ideal temperature range for bacteria to thrive, which starts at around 8 degrees.

How much could you save?

In the past, I’ve looked at how much money a friend saves by rarely washing his bed sheets (I know, yuck). I hope he never tries this.

But if your bed is cleaner than his (and it isn’t hard), would this save any meaningful amount of money?

According to uSwitch, the cost of cooking accounts for about 4% of the average gas and electricity bill, meaning my household is probably spending around £48 a year for all our cooking.

But I do a lot of slow cooking, which I know is meant to cut my cooking costs even without the bed. According to nPower, a slow cooker uses around one unit of electricity for eight hours of cooking – working out at around 2.5p an hour.

That means that the two hours my soup spent in bed saved me 5p at the most. This isn’t exactly a get-rich-quick scheme.

Will I do it again?

No. I simply cannot believe that this is a particularly good way to save money or to safely cook food. With two small children, I don’t want to leave hot pots hidden on beds or carry large dishes upstairs. I can’t ever see me doing this again.

However, this hasn’t been a total write-off. It did get me thinking about using my oven more efficiently. After all, my oven is very well insulated, that’s how it gets so hot.

In the future, I think I will bring a slow-cooking pot up to temperature in the oven and then turn the oven off. The slow cooker will keep on simmering the food and the oven will remain warm for a while too. That has to be a more effective way to save money and slow cook.

[The slow cooker movement explained]

What do you think? Have you ever tried slow-cooking in bed? Would you? Have your say using the comments below.