Does anyone have a breadmaker?

[seb1]

Every so often I think about getting one (never have so far), so does anyone have one and are they any good?

I have one - my dh uses it

Yes & yes.
Panasonic is pricey but good.

we have the panasonic one

yes - DH bought me one for my birthday a few years ago - I was not very impressed, but the econd half of the present was he makes the bread - if you set it on timer is a great smell to wake up to

yes i have one. it's great. we had one as a wedding present nearly 4 years ago and it was one of the best presents.makes your house smell yummy to

Yes, Panasonic, I use it loads as it's so easy.

we use it to make pizza dough quite a lot - only takes about 40 mins.

the progeny love making their own pizzas

Yes - Panasonic and yes

I've got one - had it about 6 weeks. It's a Panasonic.

I like it because it means I can have 'good' bread - i.e not supermarket pulp - all week long, but I still like to have a nice sourdough loaf from a bakery from time to time.

The texture is a bit bland, you don't get a good thick chewy crust like you do on a specialist bakery loaf - although I think I havn't been using the light / dark crust option properly.

It will bake spelt flour bread, and any number of options including French and Italian - I haven't tried those yet.

Blu - we tend to use the French bread recipe to avoid the thick crust

Panasonic and its fab. I'm speaking as someone who has any number of unused gadgets in her kitchen, I use my breadmaker at least once a week, get it for chirstmas.

My parents gave us our breadmaker for Christmas after we had expressly said we didn't want one. They were right. We were wrong.

We wouldn't live without it now - would definitely replace it if it broke. Good bread, fresh as you like in the morning and I know what's in it (DH is nut-allergic). And it makes damn fine gingerbread, too!

I have one but don't use it as much as I should.

Must experiment more!

I've got a Morphy Richards one; they are good but I haven't perfected my loaves yet! My Dad has and his bread is wonderful!

Will try the french bread option!

How do you make gingerbread?

Due to all the MN post about bread machines I got mine out again about 4 weeks ago - I havn't brought a loaf since.

I would love a panasonic but my LG is ok and my dd's love the bread it makes.

I also put it on timer and wake up a around 5am every moring to the fantastic smell waffting upstairs.

So a big thank you to all you mn's that got me back into bread making

Gingerbread - the recipe is in my machine's instruction book. Goodness knows whether it would work on a different machine, but if you want to experiment, here it is:

115g butter
125g golden syrup
50g treacle
125g light brown sugar
200ml milk
1 egg, lightly beaten
280g plain flour (not bread flour)
10ml ground ginger
10ml baking powder
3.5ml bicarbonate of soda

Melt together butter, syrup, treacle and sugar in a saucepan. Pour into bread pan.

Add milk and egg.

Sift together the other ingredients and sprinkle over the liquids.

Put into bread machine.

Bake on a cake/quick bread cycle, which on my machine takes 1 hour 50 minutes.

According to the manual, the machine does 6min of intermittent kneading, then 14min of continuous kneading and then a 90min bake. I guess there are probably similar cycles on other machines, but you'd have to experiment.

NB, we are talking about the kind of gingerbread that you slice up and eat with a cup of tea - not the sort that you cut into men!

Thanks for the gingerbread recipe - not sure it sounds easier than making it without a breadmaker...but I will try it!

we got ours following a similar thread a year ago, panasonic with seed/raisin dispenser, love it, DH uses it more than me which has to be a good thing!

panasonic is great. must get some spelt flour. i like doves farm flour generally.

I have one that I bought from Lidl and it is brilliant. It wasn't too pricey either and has a gluten free setting which I use to make bread for MIL and she says it's fab!

yes we use doves, decent flour does make a difference, as does binning a sachet of yeast after its been open a couple of days

we also tend to use the ciabatta recipe as our basic mix, it uses olive oil instead of butter, no milk powder and less sugar, but we bake it on whichever program suits, not jsut on italian, seems to work well...

TBH the novelty wore off after a while and it's in a cupboard.
I am not very good at slicing bread anyway and bread in my house is used for sandwiches and toast.

I use mine for all our bread i make one loaf every 2 days, it tastes so much better than shop brought bread im my opinion and i can still be lazy!