Bread Machines - Gimmick Or Valuable Kitchen Appliance

Bread machines have been around for quite some time, and most of them make a decent loaf of simple bread for dinner, even if much of the bread does not look like a "loaf" of bread. Unfortunately...even though most of us would rather have a slice of homemade bread than the chemical-laden stuff passed off as bread in the supermarket...it is simply too time consuming to bake our own bread.

The good news, however, is that today's machines have many more capabilities for producing a large variety of shapes, sizes, and flavors of bread...as well as cutting out much of the work.

Here is a typical step-by-step run-through of the entire process for baking a loaf of bread in a modern day bread machine:

1) Follow a Recipe. In the beginning, this is very important. As you gain more experience, you can experiment as much as you like.

2) Gather your ingredients. As with most recipes, everything goes smother and faster when you have your materials laid out. Fortunately, this does not take much time here, because bread requires very few ingredients.

3) Warm everything. It always seems to work best if everything, including ingredients, is at room temperature when you begin.

4) Measure precisely. "Baking" is much different than "cooking" in that baking requires more precision measurements. You cannot "season-to-taste" when baking.

5) Add ingredients. The instructions that came with your machine will tell you in what order to add ingredients into the machine bread pan-and the order can be different for different model machines. This is important.

6) Program your machine. Your machine instructions will give you many program settings for a large variety of breads, and for different environments, such as, high altitude, high humidity, and the like. Follow these instructions closely when setting your machine, especially until you gain some experience with it.

7) Start and leave. Push your start button and unless you will be adding fruit or nuts during the mixing, just walk away and don't mess with your machine-let it do its work. You can even leave your house if you like, and return to the aroma of freshly baked bread.

All of these steps take very little time, because the bread machine does all the work. And the little effort it takes in the beginning is well worth it...many times over.

A couple more pointers:

• Follow your machine instructions closely until you gain some experience and want to experiment with changing the program settings.


• Measure your ingredients precisely. It is highly recommended that you use a food scale instead of measuring cups. Yes, I said this before, but it is important enough to repeat.

I should also mention that as you gain experience and start feeling frisky, you can experiment with making things other than loaves of bread with your bread machine. This could include rolls, hamburger buns, cakes, and even jam. A bread machine is not only a highly universal device, it is probably the only kitchen appliance you will ever have that can pay for itself in a short period of time.