Breadmakers
Last updated: April 7, 2008.
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.
The trouble with bread
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.
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 a 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:
- Mixing: You take flour,
yeast, water, fat, sugar, and salt and mix them together to make dough.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- Baking: Finally, you put
the dough in a tin, place the tin in your oven, and bake.
Automatic for the people
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.
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.
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 lip 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.
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:
- Select the type of bread (basic, wholewheat, multigrain, French,
or pizza).
- 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.)
- Select the size of loaf (large, medium, or small).
- Select the type of crust you want.
- Press the TIMER button. The display shows the total time the loaf
will take to prepare and cook.
- 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 breadmake'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.
Does it save 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.
