So I’m trying to save money, and be healthy. Part of this is taking my lunch these days, which about half the time is a sandwich. But good bread is sooooo expensive, and cheap bread is so bad and maybe not that healthy.
Do people who know good bread have any experience with the under $100 auto bread machines? Are there any that will give me a good yummy bread, or do I need the expensiver ones? And do they last pretty well? It’s gotta last a decent time to be a money saver.
I personally have had better luck with the ones that look like R2D2 than the square-ish loaf ones, but I think it’s just me. I’ve ended up sticking with the the same one for over 20 years. Get one at a yard sale or second-hand store and try it out. It’s silly to pay a fortune for one when you can get one for under $20 that someone never used or used a couple of times and lost interest in. If you like it enough you can keep it, or upgrade if you want to. Mine is very basic, but it does absolutely everything I’d ever want a breadmaker to do. I can’t see any difference between older used ones and expensive new ones, except the price.
A tip if you make whole-grain bread is to add a tablespoon or so of gluten (in the fancy flour section) to help it rise.
The machines last a long time, I would definitely try yard sales or craigslist for a used one. You need to use bread flour, but its easy to find these days.
You might have to experiment a little to get the denseness or fluffiness you prefer, but I’ve had good results. It can also make dough for pizza, cinnamon rolls, etc.
It takes some experimentation to make quality breads. Most will turn out dense, but you can get some very tasty stuff by using various whole grains and adding just about anything, chocolate, fruit, nuts, pepperoni, etc… Some of them are a little annoying to clean. We had an R2D2 type for a long time. We may still have it, but I think when my boys turned into teenagers we couldn’t make enough bread to keep up with them. Pizza dough is easy to make without a machine, but we made bagels, rolls, and the like. You’ll need someplace to store a lot of flour. And we usually kept a few pre-mixed packages around to get something started quick.
I used to have a breadmaker, but a puppy chewed the cord in half. i found it was very easy just to make bread from scratch. But I will say that being able to set up the breadmachine before you went to work adn having bread ready to come out when you get home is great. I just didn’t like the tall loaves.
I have a bread machine cookbook, and this was my favorite recipe:
For a 1 lb loaf:
3/4 c milk
1 egg
2 tbls butter
3 tbls honey
1/2 tsp salt
2 c bread flour
1 1/2 tsp yeast
StG
Before you spend any money on a bread machine, read this article from the New York Times. It describes a recipe that supposedly makes good bread without having to knead it. (Note that I haven’t made it, although I think others here have.)
I gained twenty pounds before I banished my bread machine to the garage. Store bread doesn’t fill the house with an irresistable aroma. Store bread tastes like food; homemade bread tastes like warm, yeasty crack. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Out of curiosity, what brand do you have? We’ve gone through 3-4 bread machines in the last 6 years, every single one of them the motor conked out on after a good year of use and we finally gave up after the last one.
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I’ve heard that from people before before, and that was one of the things that scared me a bit
I came in here to post this article.
I had a bread maker once; I took it back within a week. I’ve never had a loaf of bread from one that’s anywhere near as good as a real bakery loaf or a real homemade loaf. Most of them don’t produce bread as good as the higher-end grocery store loaves. In my opinion, bread machines are another one of those inventions that are foisted on people with a marketing messages based on fear - making bread from scratch is HARD! Nobody could do that without a MACHINE to HELP! We’re mere MORTALS, we can’t possibly COOK anything OURSELVES!
The reality is that making bread with nothing but your hands, a bowl, an oven, and some flour, water, yeast, and salt is incredibly easy. I’ve made the bread in the article above, and it’s really, really good. Like from-a-bakery good, and next to no work at all.
The only downside is that it doesn’t make loaf-shaped bread, which is easier to make sandwiches with. Fear not; making loaf-shaped sandwich bread is also dead easy, and you can make several loaves and freeze them. There’s dozens of recipes out there, if you’re interested I’ll scare up a few of my favorite.
The issue is time to watch. I really don’t want to leave my oven on while I go to work or sleep, But a bread maker, no problem.
Bread machines are like crockpots and rice cookers - not essential, but for some people they’re wonderful tools.
Me, I make all my homemade bread by hand the old fashioned way - probably because I pre-date bread machines. But every now and then I think about the machines, because I’m busy and often don’t have the time to bake my own bread.
So… great for some people, but not for all.
I was slow to convert, having made bread by hand all my life. I broke down and bought my first bread maker six or seven years ago, a Rakuten: Online & In-Store Cash Back | Shop 3,500 Stores!
My wrists still thank me. I was blown away that I could turn out a decent loaf of bread, using common, everyday ingredients in less than an hour!
No fuss, no mess, takes about a minute to load all the ingredients and push the button. An hour later, out pops a steaming hot, wonderfully smelling loaf of goodness.
I got so dependent on the thing that I feared it might break down after several years of use, so I bought a duplicate that’s still sitting in the box in my pantry. The old one still chugs away after all these years, as dependable as the first loaf. I use it at least twice a week and can highly recommend this brand.
I always find an alternate use for the middle of the loaf where the paddle does its thing, but if it irritates you, just let the machine do all the mixing, kneading and rising, then transfer to loaf pans and your oven. Better yet, grout the hole with a stick of real butter as the loaf cools!
I’ve baked bread from scratch plenty of times and I still love my breadmaker. Making it from scratch isn’t hard, it’s just a pain in the butt. I’d much rather just throw all the ingredients together and let the machine take care of the rest.
As for the quality of the bread, some of the loaves I’ve made in the machine have been better than the ones I’ve made by hand or bought in a bakery, some have been worse. As long as you get a decent machine it should all just depend on what ingredients you use.
Bread crack!! I’d take the machine to work with the ingredients in the pan. Plug in, turn on, and after a couple of hours have the entire office salivating (and begging). I always used the longest setting - less dense. I used up an Htachi and a Sunbeam - both lasted about 6 years each - 4 to 5 loaves per week.
Couple of tips. I’ve never used straight whole wheat, too tough to get right. Usually 1/3 WW and 2/3 bread flour. I always added at least a 1/4 cup oatmeal (not the instant) for body. Potato bread and garlic/parmesian were favorites.
Maybe they’re better than they used to be - my experience was ten or twelve years ago, and I bought the best-rated machine I could find. It produced semi-OK sandwich bread. I found it was hard to get much variation in the crumb, and the loaf was much lighter than I’d like it to be, and heck if I could get a decent crust.
That was my experience, too, with a machine at least that old. Convenient, but couldn’t get it near as good as when I made it by hand or bought from a local bakery, and not even as good as the best packaged brand at the supermarket (though it was just as good as wonderbread-style ‘wheat’ bread at the supermarket). Again, this was a basic machine with I think exactly two different possible programs, so if there are modern ones that allow you to adjust everything, that might work better.
Woah synchronicity. I had never heard of Jim Lahey before yesterday evening when I was looking through a back-issue of Gourmet magazine. He had a recipe for no-knead panettone. Strikes me he’s just a lazy bastard. 
i started baking bread by hand back in the Sixties, my granny having done so since around 1900. but i got a bread machine soon after they came out in the Eighties because i didn’t have the time to bake bread that i had once had and i was developing arthritis in my hands which made kneading very painful. i loved kneading the dough and forming the loaves by hand and still miss it but new situations require adaptation.
that machine lasted for many years and so has our current one. we didn’t really need a new machine, just a new pan because we did have trouble with bread sticking to the pan, but the pans were so expensive we bought two machines on sale instead. (friends who had the same brand and model of machine never had any problem with the bread sticking to the pan. go figure.)
some people get into this big mystique about baking bread, sit around and talk about different gluten levels in flours, etc., but it’s really not rocket science and you can bake bread with good taste and texture in a machine. a machine loaf won’t be shaped like a handmade loaf and it will have that hole in the bottom where the paddle went. if you have a dog, they always love getting the ugly bottom of the loaf, or you can use the bottom of the loaf to make bread crumbs.
if you’ve tried different recipes and your bread still isn’t turning out the way you want it to, whether you’re using a machine or making it ‘by hand,’ ask someone for advice and/or a recipe. you do have to find a recipe that suits you. there’s not much you can do wrong with bread other than use water so hot that it kills the yeast. use warm water. if you use water that’s not warm enough, it will slow the rising of the bread. my mom did this once and the dough wasn’t rising much at all. my dad just added more yeast and kneaded it in and it turned out fine; his mom was my granny who baked bread every week so he never thought of making bread as a mystery. if you’re worried about water temperature, you can always get a thermometer to check it, but most people can tell the difference between “hot” and “warm” water with their fingers.
I think there’s a compromise. To me, bread machines bake a terrible loaf–the crust is never right (the oven doesn’t get hot enough nor can you dump water in it to make the loaf’s crust really tough), the shape is wrong for anything except eating slabs of bread…
…but they’re GREAT for kneading and rising.
When I still had mine, I used it to make the dough, knead it, rise it and then I’d pull it out, spend 30 seconds shaping it into a real loaf, letting it rise again (covered) and then tossing into a real oven. You get a vastly better product for about 5 minutes of extra work.