I am here! To everyone who emailed me or left comments wondering where I am, I've just had a brainful of stuff to contend with over the last 2-3 weeks and had no time to write anything other than client work. In the back of mind though I have still been writing posts - they just never got as far as here!
So, I'm going to carry on where I left off last time and talk a bit more about breadmakers. This is going to be an epic post as it's such a big topic, so if I were you I'd go get a cup of tea.
Why own one?
- If you're a fiend for fresh bread but can't be bothered to make it by hand....
- If you don't like the idea of a hundred strange people handling your supermarket loaf...
- If waking up to the smell of crusty, fresh bread makes you feel ridiculously happy...
- If bread has got so expensive in your country you need a loan to afford a loaf....
- If the idea of manufacturer's cooking bread by steaming, not baking, just doesn't seem right....
....a breadmaker is for you. I qualify on every one of those points above.
When you first get your shiny breadmaker, you will feel a sense of excitement at the prospect of producing fresh bread within the hour!!!
Squash that feeling down.
To start off with you and your breadmaker will have a few turbulent moments getting to know one another.The success you have producing your first loaf will be tempered by the blood, sweat and tears you suffer for the first few times getting the bloody thing to rise. Making the perfect load of bread is a marathon, not a sprint.
The recipe
The breadmaker manufacturers usually include a recipe book in with their machine. To start off, consider this your bible until you are confident you can make a simple loaf of bread every time. Don't try and add in your own touch of flair here and there in the beginning by flinging in extra ingredients or re-arranging the order of ingredients. It doesn't work and will sap your confidence with every non-risen loaf it produces. If the troubleshooting section of the recipe book isn't adequate, buy/borrow a breadmaking book that has a good one or hunt on the internet for one to help you work out the likely causes of any disasters.
Now, there are a few golden rules in the beginning. Like everything, when you've learnt 'a craft' you can push the rules, but until you have, don't.
1) Don't swap ingredients in the beginning or tinker too much. For example, if the ingredients tell you to use fast action dried yeast, don't swap it for yeast that you have to mix with warm water, sugar and let ferment for five minutes just because you have that in your cupboard. Use fast action yeast.
If the recipe tells you to add, water, flour, milk powder, salt, sugar, yeast and butter in that order it's for a reason! Some ingredients in bread don't mix well together on their own. Classic example is salt and yeast. Yeast needs sugar to work and is killed by salt in large quantities. So if you add salt, yeast, then sugar, your loaf probably won't rise because you've killed the yeast by sticking it directly on top of the salt. Put the salt in first, cover it with the sugarand sit the yeast happily on top. Once the machine starts mixing, the concentration of ingredients will be dispersed and it isn't a problem.
2) CHANGE ONLY ONE THING AT A TIME. I can't stress this enough. You'll never get the recipe to work if you change two or three things every time and you'll never learn what parts of the recipe are the most sensitive to change. Some breadmakers are also sensitive. Now I have to confess, I bought my breadmaker about five years ago so it's possible that the early ones are a little temperamental and their sensitivity doesn't exist in the later models (yeah right and pigs might fly). It took me many goes to get a good loaf of bread, a bit of tinkering here and there and now I stick to that recipe.
3) Make the smallest loaf you can until you get a good result. Don't try making a 2lb loaf of bread straight off the bat as it's a waste of ingredients. Start small - maybe a 1lb or less - and then work up to 1.5lb and 2lb.
4) Once you've conquered bread, try cakes and rolls, but once again stick to the ingredient quantities and order. If it doesn't work you can make changes. My last post dealt with the problems I had making chelsea buns for the first time despite sticking to the recipe. Next time I make them, I'll decrease the amount of water a little and try again. If you make anything with eggs, stick to the size of egg recommended where possible. If it says use a small one, don't fling in a large one and think it will be ok. Large ones = more fluid which could throw off the recipe.
Ingredients
1) Once you have selected your ingredients stick to using those all the time. Sometimes buying a different brand can throw the whole process off. As far as possible I tend to use non-branded ingredients because chances are they'll stay on the shelves a lot longer than a branded one might and they are cheaper. Also, the quality of branded products change between supermarkets so, for example, if you usually buy your yeast from Tesco and then get some from Sainsbury's, you might find it doesn't work so well. You might need to use more or less Sainsbury's yeast to get the same result compared to the Tesco yeast.
2) Running out of an ingredient should strike fear into you as substituting an ingredient or trying to go without can lead to trouble UNLESS you approach it a bit logically and scientifically. Once I ran out of milk powder and decided to add some normal milk, BUT I didn't just fling it in. I knew I had to add it to the wet ingredients on the bottom so I reduced the amount of water I used by the same amount of milk that I added, so the overall amount of liquid was the same. I then held my breath for a few hours until it had finished and luckily it had made the perfect loaf of bread. However, it may not work for you.
3) Changing ingredients. I used to leave out the butter in the beginning on the grounds of health and then wonder why it never rose well. Bread needs fat in it to rise properly. I tested healthy marg compared butter, which worked ok and now I add it every single time. If you have a problem with something in a bread machine recipe, try and substitute it rather than leave it out.
Timing
1) To start off use the standard time recommended by the manufacturer's recipe book. It's very tempting to use Fastbake if you have it - don't. It's just one more factor in the mix to contend with if the bread doesn't rise. Start off with the standard timings and once everything is working, try Fastbake.
2) Timer programmes are temperamental. Most machines have a programme that allows you to put all the ingredients in and start baking at a time you can dictate. So if you want to rise at 7am to the smell of freshly baked bread, you can set the timer to start the programme so it will finish at this time.
My bread machine pointedly refuses to work on this setting. I have a hunch that the dry ingredients end up a gunky sodden heavy mass when they have to sit in the wet ingredients for about 5 hours before the programme starts, but I can't prove it. So, I just don't bother. I put the machine on before I go to bed at around 10:30pm and Martin takes the bread out at 5am to make his lunch. It does mean that it's not as crispy as it might be because of condensation as the bread machine cools down, but I can live with it.
Costs
Ok...I'm going to try and work out costs here for a 1lb loaf which lasts Martin and I about 2.5 days. I use a combination of strong white bread flour and wholemeal flour for a half and half loaf.
- Water - 275ml; don't ask me to work it out in pence
- Milk - 25ml; 2p (based on 6 pints of milk at £1.96)
- White bread flour - 0.5lb; 8p (based on 1.5kg or 3.3lb at 48p)
- Wholemeal flour - 0.5lb; 9p (based on 1.5kg or 3.3lb at 60p)
- Salt - 1.5tsp, 0.003p (based on 750g of salt being 24p)
- Sugar - 2tsp; 0.01p (based on 1kg of caster sugar being 84p)
- Yeast - 1 sachet; 6.25p (based on 8 sachets at 50p)
- Margarine - 1oz; 3p (based on 1kg of marg being £1.09)
Total cost for one 1lb loaf = 28.25p
Martin and I get through three of these 1lb loaves a week so that's a total bread cost of 84.75p. Any left over ends that we can't cut up goes in the freezer and I make bread pudding at a later date. The equivalent loaf in tesco would be an 800g Hovis half and half loaf which would last us a week and which costs £1:20.
No contest. For size, quality and taste I'm for making my own bread every time.
By the way, if you want to try a breadmaker without buying one, go onto your local freecycle and place a free ad to see if anyone has one stuffed in their cupboard they don't use. A lot of people get put off when they can't make the recipe work and store them away for ever. The same goes for a lot of kitchen gadgets like doughnut makers and cheese toastie machines. I wouldn't ever buy these unless I absolutely had to as there's too many floating around one step from being thrown away.