I finally purchased a bread machine. It’s a Zojirushi Virtuoso, and manomanoman, this does everything but crochet sweaters!
So far, I’ve baked four loaves. First loaf was the Gluten-Free flour (Premium Gold gluten-free flax and ancient grains all-purpose flour). I used xanthan gum and the bread turned out quite nice! I had done some research on baking bread with gluten-free flour, and the pictures of the loaves were caved-in and dense looking. This bread had a nice rounded top and was a very light texture, held together well when sliced.
Second loaf was after my fifty pound sack of bread flour arrived. Plain old white bread. Snarfed up by everybody when the bread was really too hot to cut!
Third loaf was plain old white bread, using the bread flour, but adding one cup of grated cheese. It was a beautiful loaf, tasted pretty good, but it really needed more cheese.
Fourth loaf was part bread flour, part gluten-free, “ancient grains” flour. I wanted cinnamon raisin bread. Other recipes called for one teaspoon of cinnamon, for a two-pound loaf. HAH! We love our cinnamon! I dumped in two TABLESPOONS of cinnamon. And I had two cups of diced, dried fruit. Unfortunately I missed the “beep” to add stuff. I dumped the fruit in anyway.:smack:
BIG MISTAKE! Learn from my error!
The fruit stuck to the outside of the loaf. It also SPILLED from the top of the loaf when the dough went through the “rise” cycle. It spilled from the top of the loaf, outside the pan, to the bottom of the baking chamber and the heating element. I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon chiseling charcoal pieces of dried fruit from the inside of the bread machine and heating element. Then I used strips of paper toweling wrung out in soapy water, and soaked what wouldn’t chisel. Repeat multiple times. I think I finally removed enough crud that I can use the machine without the bread tasting like it was cooked in an open dutch oven over campfire coals.
I hope so.
My next project will use the dough setting, and I shall attempt…hamburger buns!
~VOW
You were spot on with the cinnamon, however. The old standby Beard on Bread has a cinnamon bread recipe that has about 4.5 cups of flour and 1 tablespoon cinnamon. It’s quite nice as written but I’m good with a tablespoon and a half.
I love my Zojirushi rice cooker, although I got it at Costco but am convinced that a $20 rice cooker would be just as good (I actually can cook rice on the stovetop, but my wife is less attentive, and Asian besides, and not using a rice cooker is anathema).
My bread cooker is some brand, I’m not sure which, that I was considering giving away until recently. I can make bread in the oven. It takes time and planning, but it’s better than the bread maker.
However, not having good bakery bread due to recent circumstances, and not wanting to take the time to make superior bread, I threw what I needed to into the bread maker, and three hours later, I had some damned good bread! What an awesome reminder that yes, consumer gadgets aren’t necessarily junk. I’m keeping this machine.
I went to Amazon first, when I was looking for a bread machine. HOLY MACARONI! Any Zojirushi was well over $500!
I figured I needed to aim low. I checked out a no-name machine that would do a two-pound loaf. It was priced in the “not outrageous category,” so I looked at the specs.
It was 220v. Well, crap!
I lucked out by having yeast on hand. But flour is getting difficult to find. Folks told me to go straight to the manufacturer to buy flour.
I went through a whole break machine phase when living in China are there are some threads for quite a few years ago about it.
Downside - you might gain weight cause it’s so dang easy and even mediocre fresh bread is pretty awesome. And these machines do much better than mediocre
There’s not a lot of yeast on the shelf, but there is some in my neck of the woods. Since Seattle was the original US epicenter, we went thru the whording early, and have restocked. Heck the other day, my local supermarket had toilet paper stacked up 10 feet high down several entire aisles. (But they had been previously empty, sparse, or sparsely filled with generic). I am still trying to get thru the Costco sized package of dry yeast that’s been in my freezer for years and years.
Fiendish, you can make your own sourdough yeast. Do a search or youtube and there are tons of sites to show you how.
Second, for the price of a self addressed stamped envelope, you can get sourdough starter that traces roots back to the 1847 Oregon Trail. Check out Friendsof Carl. Carl Griffith shared out sourdough starter from his Grandmother on the Oregon Trail, after Carl passed away “friends of carl” keep his starter alive and share it out.
Beer yeast can do in a pinch as well. Get yourself a bottle of real ale, reculture the yeast, and bob’s your uncle.
I have had a sourdough starter for about 18 months, but my sourdough breads have been nice-tasting but generally haven’t risen well enough.
No longer - I found a recipe by Joshua Weissman as presented on “Basics with Babish” that is easy and works (it takes time, but that’s OK). Using a levain addresses the issue of not having the correct hydration in the starter, and I used a pizza stone and an inverted cast iron enamel casserole instead of a dutch oven, and it has been awesome.
I need to try and add some granary mix to make a seeded loaf at some point, but I am really happy about my new sourdough skills.
As for breadmakers, we have had a Panasonic breadmaker for six years now. It makes a great yeast-risen granary loaf (50% wholemeal flour) that is our primary loaf for toast and sandwiches. I’ve never seen a Zojirushi in the shops here, but I’ll buy another Panasonic if ours ever dies …
There is a happy medium between “bread by hand” and “bread machine bread” which has been my main bread-making process for years. All you do is put your ingredients (from a machine recipe or a regular recipe) into the machine, choose the dough setting, and let the machine do all the work of kneading/first rise.
Then, take the dough, put it into bread pans, and let it do a second rise on the counter. Bake in the oven.
For me this combines (pun intended) the convenience of a bread machine with the flexibility, shape, and flavor of a more traditional loaf baked in the oven.
After I bought my first Zojirushi and was enjoying a bread machine cookbook, Mr VOW’s stepmom stopped by for a visit. Now this was a woman who baked bread from scratch. She probably could do it with one hand tied behind her back.
I wanted to show off my new toy, so I offered to bake a loaf of bread for her. I got out the machine, all the ingredients, dumped everything in the pan according to directions and pressed START. I showed her the little window on top so you could peek inside.
This was the Zojirushi that made a tall vertical loaf, and it had just one paddle in the bottom of the pan. Stepmom had to stand on her very tippy toes to see inside. “That’s not going to work,” she said, as the cycle first started mixing.
I laughed, and assured her I had already made several loaves of bread in that machine, and it worked just fine.
She came down off her toes, and looked at me like I was crazy. “Aren’t you going to stand there and watch it?”
Then I really laughed. I said the machine would be just fine. We could go into the other room and visit, and the machine would continue to work all by itself.
I finally dragged her into the other room so we could sit and visit. A few hours later, I was able to give her a fresh hot slice of homemade bread. She analyzed it with a critical eye and finely-tuned taste buds…and then admitted it was a great piece of bread.
~VOW
I have a bread machine I found at Goodwill years ago and bought figuring it was worth checking out. I guess people get them, use them a few times and then they sit around until they decide to get rid of them. Having somewhere to store it where it’s not in the way, but easy to get out helps. I use mine fairly often, so well worth the 3.99 investment and it just won’t die.
It bakes an odd shaped square loaf, so prefer to just go to the dough stage and then rise and bake the bread in two loaf pans. Cranberry orange bread is my go to, but I also like making cinnamon rolls. I should probably try to make something a little healthier, but don’t have anything except white flour in the pantry right now.
Sorry to hijack but why a rice cooker (aside from your wife insists)? I make rice all the time and it’s foolproof. One part rice, two parts water, a tiny splash of olive oil, heat until it just starts to boil, turn the burner to low and cover. Twenty minutes later…rice.
Is it better rice in the cooker? What if I only make a third to half a cup at a time to go with a meal?
also on teh breadFor me I love my rice cooker as well. The best benefit is the convenience. Personally I gave up on White rice and only eat Brown rice, because it has better flavor and texture. But it takes 90-100 to make. I can start it up, going for some errands, and come back from 1.5 to 4 hours later for some perfect rice waiting for me. Can’t do that with a burner on.
Also on the bread front, I pulled out a frozen loaf from last week, and put the ball on a baking sheet under a bowl with the oven light on to defrost and raise.
When I remembered it 8 hours later it had oozed out of a ball, into a pillow, so I baked it that way. Was a nice ciabattaey loaf. Although I didn’t consider that extra surface area and adjust the cook time, so it over cooked a bit.
harario, rice cookers are the BOMB if you eat a lot of rice. It’s hard to screw this up. Plus there are timers and multiple varieties of finished rice.
