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Ok very off topic, but I have noticed there are some keen amateur bakers lurking on here...
SWMBO and I are keeping an eye on salt levels in food (toddler in the house!) and have noticed that a lot of bought bread has quite a lot of salt in, we thought maybe we could avoid that (and get yummy bread into the bargain) by maybe getting a breadmaker.
So does anyone have any must avoids or best machines to suggest?
Thanks :-)
I'm old fashioned and curmudgeonly - why do you need a machine? Just make bread! Although, I did use the dough hook attachments on my new mixer to make pizza dough last week.
I've had good luck this year freezing dough and then baking some weeks later. definitely good for time-saving.
We have a Panasonic - it was recommended and works fine. You need to be careful with flour selection this year. Some has less gluten than usual and breadmaker doesn't work as well with this (cos automatic). There was a bad harvest. Hand baking is even better & nice & relaxing but you need time.
We have a Panasonic too - the SD 2500. It is great but having got it I have found myself wishing we had got the next model up as it adds seeds and stuff automatically and does rye bread. Apart from that, very happy.
Some are very noisy so be careful if a noisy appliance is likely to be a problem. I rejected one kind after listening to a youtube video of it! Sounded like an elephant in a blender.
I should like to point out - I have never attempted to blend an elephant. It just sounded like how I would imagine an elephant being blended to sound.
Mrs S had one which would steadily work its way off the bench. Really put a damper on breakfast to find your bread slowly expanding across the floor.
I use a bread maker just to mix the dough because life's too short to knead and anyway, if you really want yummy bread you want sourdough and breadmakers are largely no good for that. So my bread maker was secondhand for a tenner. When it dies I'll probably go straight to a Kenwood chef for the mixing. They're more versatile.
But yes, make bread. All the best breads can't be done in a machine - ciabatta, focaccia, baguettes, rolls, milk loafs. Actually, apart from reasonably cheap powerful motors for mixing, there's not much they're good for. They make a passable square loaf with a hole in the bottom. Wouldn't pay full price for one.
The big benefit is that you can control the ingredients and, compared to hand baking, they require much less hands on time. So for time poor folk they're good for daily bread.
For some wetter dough, eg ciabata, it is much more pleasurable to get the machine to prep the dough and the finish off by hand
We have an Anthony Worral Thomson - it was a steal.
And the other thing machines do is keep the dough at a consistent temperature for the time that it needs to rise. If you've not got a good warm cupboard or an Aga to sit it beside that's a bonus.
I've got the Panasonic SD 2501 which has the automatic dispenser. It's handy for making fruit loaves as you don't need to listen for a very quiet beep warning you when it's time to add stuff.
I've got a book by Karen Saunders which has sourdough recipes for bread machines. I haven't tried any yet, got the book from Santa. I have made milk loaf in it but I don't like them all that much, a bit too much like cake.
I'm about to stick an olive and oregano loaf in there overnight and I'll wake up to bready smell in the morning. That one is a favourite of my parents and a friend at work. Sun dried tomato and Parmesan is popular too. Grass Roots in Glasgow sell veggie Parmesan style cheese.
Malt extract for malted fruit loaf is available from Holland and Barrett. Morrisons had never heard if it.
I've got a Prima breadmaker that I've had for years - a bit noisy when mixing/kneeding but makes great bread. You can also use it just to make dough which is great for homemade pizzas.
We have the Panasonic SD 252. We do make the odd loaf but mainly just make dough for pizza. The good thing we like is setting it up the evening before and having it start in the middle of the night so we can wake up to fresh bread in the morning. As others have said they're not noisy really, and we'd know as we live in a bungalow so noise does carry.
I did find the loaves heavier than the factory made sliced sandwich bread but they do come with a dozen recipies and as some have said, a nice bread book gives you some nice ideas.
So, is the popularity of bread-machines really a labour saving thing? or a skills-loss/confidence boost thing?
What I mean is, I bake bread mainly because my mother baked bread all through my childhood. She never showed me how, and I don't follow her recipe, but I still thought of it as a fairly normal thing to do, and not particularly scary.
But I can totally see how if you were contemplating starting to bake, a bread machine would seem easier than trying to decide on a recipe, figure out the ingredients etc, and make you feel a lot more confident of a good result.
Waking up to a warm loaf is quite pleasant too although they aren't easy to slice when they just come out of the machine. I got my dad a rotary slicer for Christmas and it makes nice thin slices which my mum likes but it doesn't work well on a very new loaf. She was fed up with door stops.
In about 30 minutes the house will be suffused with fresh bread smell. That's quite pleasant of a morning too.
I have been inspired to reinvigorate my starter. So, in about 4 days, we too should be smelling fresh baked bread :)
@SRD for us it is time saving rather than labour saving. Baking bread by hand is easy enough but requires 15 mins or so to produce the dough, then you have to be around for the rising/deflation cycles and to shape and stick in the oven. With the machine you just put the ingredients in and 5 hours later take out the loaf.
Well there is your answer really. If bread making was so trivial you would be doing it all the time. I use our breadmaker every week. Plus as Insto says, we don't all have an aga or an airing cupboard for it to rise in.
Not so much labour saving as attention saving. Even when you're only using it to mix and raise the dough you just throw the ingredients in, set it going and walk away for 90 minutes. For sourdough, tip the dough out, shape it and put it in a basket to prove for three to five hours.
That's mainly what I like about sourdough - the ability to manipulate the rise by keeping it in different parts of the house where it's warmer or colder. If I want it fast it goes by the Aga or the stove (if it's on). If I want it to take longer it goes through the back where it's cold or in the fridge overnight.
@min - I got through phases when I make several loaves every week, but I'm not consistent. depends on too many variables (mainly sick kids + work). But also that we have three really good bakeries within 2 min of home/work.
Never had a problem with raising though, despite no aga or airing cupboard.
If I had the counter space, I might consider getting a breadmachine, but right now our two most used devices are slow cooker and ice-cream maker - both of which get used weekly & sometimes daily.
I gave up on the ice cream maker years ago because the mixer would stick on fruit pips and once it was stuck it was hard to unstick.
I suppose I could dig it out again.
So what ice cream making machine do people recommend?
I like a proper manual churn, but they appear to be impossible to get here, so we got an 'Andrew James' which is small and a Which best buy. have been using it quite a lot since November and no complaints.
best recipe so far is a Nigel Slater with marmalade and chocolate chunks. No sticking problems with that.
So what ice cream making machine do people recommend?
Good grief, an O/T thread going O/T . . .
Could someone link a manual churn ice cream machine up to an indoor trainer, that should do the trick.
"Could someone link a manual churn ice cream machine up to an indoor trainer, that should do the trick."
It's been done for smoothies -
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-create-a-human-powered-bike-blender-for-les
I have the basic Panasonic. Also five year warranty with John Lewis as I use it almost every day. Put on at night,have,it in the morning for pieces. Tricky to slice. Recently with cold weather and now I learn duff flour I have had some flyaway tops and some a bit sunken. However, moved machine away from window and use the bigger setting so all is improving.
Have made ice cream with a food processor for years. Frozen fruit eg raspberries, bit of sugar, bit of flavourless oil. Blend, then eat. Works with frozen pineapple chunks too. Drain the juice off before freezing.
This works well and the resultant pudding is also vegan
Looks like Panasonic is in the lead!
We are on our third bread maker.
First one was a Kenwood which proved difficult to clean. Then blade got lost and it broke.
Second one was a Prima which burnt out with too many rapid loaves. Tried to repair both.
Currently on a Bifinet - from Lidl.
If everyone had this breadmaking experience then the planet couldn't support it(!)
We did recycle the failed ones. Basically they all have only so many loaves in them it seems.
My wife reminds me that breadmakers are good for pizza dough.
Ooh really? What do you think the average loaf-span is then?
The isotope Half-loaf is dependent on how often you use them. I had a morphy Richards with a two year guarantee, went through five of them. Morphy Richards are for buying then putting at the back of a cupboard
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