ffutures | Bread machines?

Bread machines?

I'm vaguely thinking of getting a bread machine - I get the impression that very little real skill is needed to use them, which suits me very well, and I do like really fresh bread in the morning occasionally.

But I don't know much about them, and there seem to be a lot of models with different features. So what I'm wondering is which are essential, and which are just feeping creaturism?

This page shows the models sold by Argos, about the most ubiquitous store in the UK. Since I want to try this without spending a fortune I'm tempted to go for the cheaper Morphy-Richards model - they have a long history of making reasonably good domestic appliances such as electric blankets and hairdriers. but I don't know it if has all the features I need.

All comments gratefully received.

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A recent survey showed that bread machines are the gadget with the lowest proportion of actual use to numbers purchased of any device in the entire history of the world (other, of course, than hydrogen bombs). We threw ours in the bin because it was just taking up space and, apparently, many thousands of other people have done the same thing or have bread machines pointlessly littering their cupboards.

They actually take a great deal of effort to use, cleaning them out after use is a nightmare, and the world would be a much better and greener place if they had never been invented.

If you do go ahead and buy one you should find it easy to pick one up second hand and it will have been hardly used.

OK - the cleaning aspect is something I hadn't realised, I sort of thought they cleaned themselves somehow. Greenness may also be a good point, as is buying one second hand.

Of course I could just try traditional baking, I suppose, but it's the "fresh bread for breakfast" side of it that appeals.

I haven't found the bread machine we have either hard to use or hard to clean. Quite the opposite. I don't use it very much, but that's mostly to do with the fact that it's huge and I don't have much counter space, so I have to go to the trouble of making room for it before I can make bread. If I had the room to leave it set up, I suspect I'd use it more often. Especially if I had one that would bake bread overnight, on a delay.

The bit I have the most problems with is getting the blade out of the cooked loaf at the end of the program.

But I do still haul my (Cookworks) bread machine out of the cupboard occasionally, and make fresh bread. But only when I know I've got someone coming over to help me eat the loaf, as it won't keep as long as commercially produced bread, and I can't quite manage a 1.5lb loaf on my own!

From friends who worship their breadmakers I understand that Panasonic is generally well regarded as a manufacturer - and the gadjet for putting in the nuts/raisins etc half way through is worth going for. If you want to clutter up your kitchen...

OTOH I've found that the packets of bread mix designed for use in the machines work perfectly well for hand-making bread - you get to do all that theraputic kneading yourself, fill the house with the smell of oven-baked bread, and only have to wipe round one ordinary bowl to clean up.

I don't have one, but both of my sisters do, and they use theirs regularly. The only skill required is the ability to measure ingredients. Cleanup consists of putting a couple of parts into the dishwasher after the bread is done.

I'm not familiar with the Morphy-Richards brand, but the feature set seems fine -- more than adequate already, in fact. That machine has all sorts of added fanciness that my bread maker does not -- multiple loaf sizes, the drop-down mixing paddle, the nuts-and-raisins adding thing, the three crust settings. I doubt my machine has as many as ten programs, either. By my lights, as long as you've got a basic loaf and a french loaf program, you're good.

So to me it looks like almost all of it is feature creep. You can make a perfectly fine loaf of bread with fewer features than the Morphy-Richards machine has, so if you can get some sort of data on machine life/reliability, I'd say go for it.

I really like ours, but we've had it for ages and ages plus we live in the US, so I couldn't give a specific model or brand recommendation.

I also have no idea what sort of added features might be available on today's models... but I can tell you the ones we use most often. I would recommend finding one that allows you to set what type of bread you're making (white, wheat, quick rise) and also allows you to set the browning level. Other than that, I've found the timer setting to be quite handy and where you want fresh bread in the morning, it sounds like it would be a necessity for you. Unless they've come up with some super-duper new feature that I'm completely unaware of, the rest would pretty much be bells and whistles.

The biggest problem with a bread machine is remembering to use it! We did pretty well for about the first year, but got tired of it being on our countertop all the time... so it lived in the garage for several years (the idea had been that it would be really easy to carry it into the kitchen when we wanted to use it, only that never happened). We recently converted a hall closet to a pantry and are storing it there now... and it's suddently much easier to pull it out once a week or so to bake some bread.

Hope that helps!

My mum bought me the the morphy richards fastbake for xmas. It's fabulous. even Pook can use it - and he does not cook. (He prefers to describe it as assembling ingredients and pressing a button.)

Once you have sealed the pan after first purchase, by heating it with a wipe of oil on it, it only needs ordinary washing up liquid and hot water to clean it. The first heat of 15 minutes is done empty so any machine oil burns off the contraption. and yep, you need to do this or it would taint the first loaf. (SMELL BAAAAD!)

Sometimes the little beater sticks in the loaf, but it's easy to get out with a chopstick. That's the only downside we've found.

It can do a loaf in an hour, but you get better results and a lighter loaf with the three hour setting. It also does two sizes of loaf and three colour settings. you can make dough to form in to bread rolls should you wish, or even pizza bases. (but we don't have a cooker so don't use this function)

And the space... we've made room for it. it gets used almost every day.
not used the timer yet, but honestly the bread doesn't get a chance to get stale.

Join us in the bread addict aisle....

My mum got a cheap one from Argos, cookworks is the brand, can't rememebr the precise machine. But she figured the fewer fancy options the better. And it's made one loaf a day for about the last 3 years. Fantastic machine. Easy to clean, doddle to make a loaf, it does most everything itself, you just measure ingrediants, pop them in, and an hour or so later, a fresh loaf.

I think she has more or less only really ever used the basic options. Never needed to do any of the fancy things.

Oh, I'd recommend making sure you don't get one that only makes the really exceptionally tiny loafs, because once you've started enjoying fresh baked bread without the supermarket chemicals...

I would recommend saving your money and investing in a couple of good bread tins and (if necessary) a decent modern oven. Making your own bread is very simple, make your dough before going to bed, then shove it in a hot oven for 20 minutes in the morning. Use a bread mix, it's fine and the quality of bread is so much better than the bricks that come out breadmakers. One less useless gadget in the kitchen too.

Wjhen staying with friends in the US I'd use their breadmaker to bake fresh loaves. I found it better to use the "dough" setting so that the breadmaker did all the hard work and the correct timings, then I'd take the dough out and bake it in the oven. The breadmaker's pan had lost most of its non-stick coating, the stirring paddle got in the way of extracting the finished loaf from the pan and the oven finished the loaf a lot better than the built-in heater did (a nicely fired crust for example, especially brushed with a milk and egg mix). Properly shaped loaf pans made turning out the finished baked loaf a lot easier.

Using it in that mode would also allow you to make small loaves rather than full-sized ones, a useful feature for someone who lives by themselves.

I usually turned out regular white loaves but occasionally I'd get creative -- grating up the dog-ends of cheese lurking at the back of the fridge, for example made a cheesebread that toasted up wonderfully.

We bought a basic bread maker when we moved to the US, its pretty low on features but it does make pretty good bread and is easy to clean and set up.

The only feature I've found a little unreliable is the timing, the few times I've used it with a long delay to get fresh bread in the morning, it hasn't worked properly. But that might be something to do with me.

We have the Panasonic SD253, which shows on that site at just under £100. I don't use it that much anymore, but that's because we stopped eating bread in any quantity for dietary reasons, not because it was a pain. It works well with the readymixes, makes excellent Italian style bread with olive oil, and lovely dense fruity breads for Christmas. It's easy to clean, and quiet. I'd prefer to make my own, but my hands are too arthritic to knead it properly and you can just bung everything in the machine and set the timer. Some styles of bread don't work with the timer, they especially warn you against any recipes with fresh milk in them.

The biggest pain, which is true of all of them, is the little extras you find yourself keeping on hand - Vitamin C powder, powdered milk, etc. My Dad lives on his own and has an earlier Panasonic than mine, which has a window you can look through. He makes all his own bread, usually freezing half a loaf to keep it fresh. I think he spends quite a lot of time in the kitchen watching it ...

I've had two, both Black & Decker models. I'd still have the old one except that the non-stick coating peeled off after ten years and the bread began to stick a bit. By then they didn't make pans for that model, so I bought a new one.

I use it every week. Takes 15 minutes including cleaning (but not counting baking time).

A friend of mine had to get a new machine and ended up with the one with a wide rectangular pan, and wishes that his old tall square model hadn't broken down, because sometimes the wide pan doesn't mix properly. So my advice would be to get one with a square cross-section -- the loaf is less like the traditional loaf, but it is more consistent.

I reckon if you went on your local freecycle and asked, ther'd be half a dozen offers before the end of the day...

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Bread machines?

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Hi, we're Pook and Lulu and we are bread addicts (Hi both!)

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Compromise

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