I want to start baking my own bread. Do I need to buy a bread machine? And if so, which ones would you recommend? Thanks!!
I'm sure you don't need to buy a bread machine; HOWEVER....if you kill yeast the way I do, then you might want to look into one! :lol: I found my bread machine at a resale shop for $6. I always see them at the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores for around $5. I'd try that first and see if you like it or not. I LOVE mine. Another thing you can do is use the bread machine to do all the hard work (dough setting) and then take out the dough, put it in bread pan(s) and bake it in your oven.
You absolutely don't need a bread machine. Just because of the convenience, though, I usually use it, as Brooke said, to do all the hard work. I can forget about it until the timer goes off, then use a regular loaf pan to bake it (I don't like the shape of bread machine loaves).
Just like others have said, your don't need a machine. I have a mixer that I use because it does all the work for me as far as mixing and kneading. When it's done I take the dough out and put it in loaf pans and bake them. Of course with my large family I have to bake 6 loaves at a time to make it through a week.
I usually make three loaves of our regular bread at a time, or the bread we eat on a daily basis. We only have three people living in our house. It would be easy enough to double or triple the recipe but them I would have to find freezer room and that I do not have. I usually cut one loaf in half and keep it in a bag on the microwave. The other two and a half loaves are frozen and I take them out half a loaf at a time. I am not a big bread eater anymore, although I still love it! My husband and daughter eat bread everyday. So I take it out maybe every other day. When I make sweet bread, I usually make three loaves too, but give two away so I do not eat it all. I love sweet anything.
I noticed my family of 4 doesn't eat nearly as much bread now that I make it myself. We love the taste, but it just seems that we don't have the carb addiction we used to.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup is very addictive...it's amazing how eliminating it from your diet makes you crave carbs less. In general.
HFCS is one of the reasons I want to bake my own bread. I buy only 100% whole wheat or grain bread without the HFCS, but we eat a lot of bread, so the cost adds up. I also want to add ground flax seed to the dough and maybe substitute sugar for honey or maple syrup...I dont know the first thing about bread though, so I wil have to look into that. I guess I will start out with a loaf pan, and go from there. I dont mind the mixing and rising part, since I do make "naan" and "roti" (both types of Indian/pakistani flatbread), and if thats what the bread machine is primarily used for, I could do without Thanks ladies!! (I guess Dh would be even more grateful, since I wont be dragging him to thriftstores to check one out...........YET...muahahahaha)
I bake all our bread...mainly to avoid all the unwanted junk that is in supermarket bread. I do some by hand and most in my bread machine. I have a Zojirushi. I really like it.
