Breadmakers

Last updated: May 22, 2009.

Freshly made bread is the best thing since—well, the best thing since sliced bread! The only trouble is, it takes time and effort. Most people have never made bread in their lives and would never dream of doing so, but the recent invention of automatic breadmaking machines has started to change all that. Now, millions are turning their kitchens into bakeries and enjoy their own freshly baked loaf each day at a fraction of the cost they'd pay in a store. What's the big attraction of bread-making machines? What are they like and how exactly do they work?

Photo: A Panasonic electronic breadmaker. Unfortunately, this early model has an opaque lid so you can't watch the ingredients slowly transform into a delicious loaf. Other makes include Sunbeam, Trillium, Magic Chef, Black and Decker, Oster, and West Bend. Be sure to check out a good selection of customer reviews before you buy!

How to make bread (the old way)

Bread is one of the world's oldest and most versatile foods. Just think of all the different types of bread (everything from a basic sliced white loaf to a really fantastic ciabatta or foccacia) and all the different ways we use dough (from simple loaves to rolls and pizza bases). Delicious!

Eating bread is an awful lot easier than making it—and that's because bread-making is necessarily a time-consuming process. Even with the help of an automatic breadmaker, it still takes several hours to make a loaf because it takes that long for the yeast to do its job.

The basic process of making a loaf involves five distinct stages:

1. Mixing: You take flour, yeast, water, fat, sugar, and salt and mix them together to make dough.
2. Kneading: You have to beat and bash the dough around to make it stretchy and elastic. Without kneading, your dough won't rise and you won't get a decent loaf.
3. Rising: Now you leave your dough in a warm place to rise for an hour or more. During this stage, the yeast does its job. Air enters the mixture and makes the dough plump up to about twice the size.
4. Knocking down and proving: Some bakers believe you should repeat the rising process a second time to produce a more even loaf. First you bash the dough about to knock the air out of it (which is called knocking down). Then you leave the dough to rise a second time in a tin (which is called proving).
5. Baking: Finally, you put the dough in a tin, place the tin in your oven, and bake.

Photo: Making decent bread can be a laborious process. If you want to make bread as well as these professional bakers, maybe what you need is a bread machine! Photos by Adam York (left) and Kyle D. Gahlau (right), courtesy of US Navy.

How a breadmaking machine makes bread the easy way

Photo: Looking straight down into the breadmaker with the lid open. You can see it's really just a compact oven. There are two heating elements at the side for baking the bread. The round thing in the middle at the bottom is the electric motor that does the kneading.

The great thing about an automatic breadmaker is that it does all these processes for you. A breadmaking machine is essentially a compact electric oven that will hold a single, large bread tin. The tin is a bit special: it has an axle at the bottom that connects into an electric motor underneath. A small metal paddle clicks onto the axle inside the tin. The axle is held by a waterproof seal so none of your bread mixture will escape.

So how does it all work? First, you put your paddle in the tin. With the tin out of the oven, you measure out your ingredients and load them up. All you have to do then is pop your tin in the oven, select the program you want using the electronic control panel, close the lid, and wait. If your breadmaker has a glass lid, you can watch what it's doing. If the lid is opaque, you'll have to listen and use your imagination. One of the first things you'll hear is the machine's motor whirring as the paddle spins round, pummelling and kneading the dough. Then everything will go quiet during the rising phase. Then you'll hear more pummelling and another period of quiet during the proving. Finally, the oven will switch on and you'll start to smell the delicious aroma of baking bread a few minutes later. The basic breadmaking process is largely automatic, but most machines come with recipe books for making more advanced types of dough.

Photo: Left: The kneading paddle. As this turns around at speed, it flings the dough around and kneads it. Right: The kneading paddle in place at the bottom of the tin. Note how the tin has a useful wire handle so you can haul it up out of the machine while it's still hot.

Some breadmakers have other features. This Panasonic has a built-in memory so it can survive short power outages ("blackouts") of a few minutes: it remembers what it was doing and continues when the power returns. Most breadmaking machines also have the ability to make a delayed start, so you can put the ingredients in before you go to bed and wake up to a fresh-baked loaf in the morning.

Photo: The Panasonic's electronic control panel and display. Using it is much simpler than it looks—no harder than programming a microwave oven.

Most breadmakers have numerous different programs for making many different kinds of loaf. You can make white bread, wholemeal, or speciality loaves by using different kinds of flour and varying the other ingredients.

Programming the Panasonic breadmaker is a simple four-stage operation:

1. Select the type of bread (basic, wholewheat, multigrain, French, or pizza).
2. Select the bake mode (bake, bake rapid, sandwich, dough). This varies the sequence of mixing, kneading, rising, and baking. For example, in dough mode, the machine stops without actually cooking the dough. At this point, you open up the lid, remove the dough, and then take it out for your pizza, croissants, or whatever. (You have to bake those in your oven, but the breadmaker helps you by preparing the dough.)
   
3. Select the size of loaf (large, medium, or small).
4. Select the type of crust you want.
5. Press the TIMER button. The display shows the total time the loaf will take to prepare and cook.
6. Press the START button and the countdown to a delicious loaf begins!

When you're loaf is done (in anything from two to six hours), you very carefully lift the lid, pull the hot tin out of the breadmaker's oven, tip out the loaf, and let it cool down. All you have to do in the way of cleaning is wash out the tin and the paddle—which takes about 30 seconds.

Do breadmaking machines save you money?

You're probably wondering how much it costs to make a loaf this way. It's impossible to say, really, because it depends on the exact ingredients you use. But with the price of flour soaring and bakeries charging ever more for their loaves, my guess is that a machine like this would easily pay for itself in a year or two, giving you quite delicious bread at the same time.