I picked up a bread machine for 3 dollars at our neighborhood yard sale yesterday… went to Wal-Mart and got the stuff that I needed to get bread (Well, most of it… I couldn’t find the wheat better for bread flour. :/).
It’s awesome. I set it to have wonderful bread ready at 8:22 this morning, which it did, but it also woke my parents up once. Oh well, I slept, but they told me I can’t use it overnight anymore.
Silly parents, messing up my future.
Anyway, I got a cookbook too for 50 cents, so I’m going to have a lot of fun with it. There’s one recipe for “Cafe Au Lait bread”, which will let me use my new espresso machine too.
Congrats and welcome to the obsession… So many, many recipes to be gotten on-line (thousands, I would say). I have three of my bread machines going now (French bread, honey-wheat-English-muffin bread, and honey-kissed white bread). It went from a hobby to an obsession for me. So many people have bread machines sitting in their basements, which they have used only once or twice. That is how I got two of mine.
Have fun, eat hearty. I, also, have not yet found the bread flour for whole wheat in stores. What kind of machine did you get?
Well, whole-wheat bread machine flour exists, because I’ve seen it at someone’s house before. I’m going to go try Harps later (another local grocery chain).
All I know about it is that it’s a Magic Chef 1.5lb, and there’s a “310” at the bottom of the manual.
BTW, if you can figure out how to make a good basic white sandwich bread loaf, please do tell. My results have been less than spectacular and my wife is not a fan (she does like the bagels and crescent butter rolls)
The best thing we did was when we took the recipe for italian bread and mashed up a couple cloves of garlic in the wet mixture part. It smelled wonderful and had just a hint of garlic in the bread.
I love my bread machine. If the hole in the bottom or the shape of the loaf annoys you, just make the dough in the unit and bake in your oven. Try making peach jam. It is delicious.
