Random question.
Nov. 8th, 2009 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaDo you have a bread machine? If so, what do you think of it?
It's that time of year again: my parents want to know what we would like for Christmas. I was thinking that a bread machine might be a good thing to have. We frequently buy artisanal-type bread from the grocery store, but (a) it's expensive, and (b) it goes stale so quickly.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bosssio brought us a loaf of homemade bread after Colin was born, I think made in a bread machine, and it was delicious and stayed fresh for several days.
So is good bread-machine bread easy to make? Are there lots of different kinds? I've seen bread-machine mixes, but presumably you can also make bread in a machine from scratch, right? Any brand recommendations?
It's that time of year again: my parents want to know what we would like for Christmas. I was thinking that a bread machine might be a good thing to have. We frequently buy artisanal-type bread from the grocery store, but (a) it's expensive, and (b) it goes stale so quickly.
bosssio brought us a loaf of homemade bread after Colin was born, I think made in a bread machine, and it was delicious and stayed fresh for several days.So is good bread-machine bread easy to make? Are there lots of different kinds? I've seen bread-machine mixes, but presumably you can also make bread in a machine from scratch, right? Any brand recommendations?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-08 08:56 pm (UTC)Getting the machine has most certainly increased breadmaking at home. I have a herniated cervical disc, and kneading is very difficult at best. The machine takes care of all that grunt work for me, and makes good-tasting bread consistently. It also lets me do things like make a home-made pizza dough that M thinks is wonderful. That's the good part.
The middle part is that you shouldn't expect perfect bread first rattle out of the box. Even using the recipes provided with the owner's manual, you'll find that you need to experiment to discover the sweet spot that produces consistently good results. You may even, as I did, find that a few of the manufacturer's recipes just won't work for you, no matter what you do with it.
The bad part starts with my machine being out of production; indeed, the company got out of the bread-machine business entirely several years ago, so if something breaks, then I better hope I can find a dealer with NOS parts someplace. (I could use a new bucket and paddle right now, and have been limping along with the current one, 'cos of the difficulties in finding parts.) Probably I'll keep using this one until something breaks that I can't fix, and then I'll replace it with a current model.
If you go ahead with the plan (and overall, I'd say it's worth going ahead with) do your research first with some place like Consumer's Union, to avoid getting a maker that looks great on the box but doesn't deliver.