Breville BR6

Author's product rating:   

Performance	Excellent
Ease of use	Very easy
Durability	Everlasting
User's Manual	Fair
Value for money	Excellent

Advantages:	Ace
Disadvantages:	local shops don't sell the right ingrdients

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

After all the Christmas and New Year gorging, and feasting, I am currently on a diet of home made bread and home made soup, in an attempt to loose the pounds piled on over Christmas

THE REASON

I have been after one of these bread making machines for some years now, but when they first came out they were horrendously expensive…about a hundred quid for a decent one, and I just couldn’t afford it.

Imagine my delight when I was trogging round the post –xmas sales, and wandered into ‘Boyes’ to see this lil’ beauty for £19.99, COOOOOOeeeeee…! A massive price drop from the usual £56 - £64 on-line price. The reason it was so low in price was because it had B-grade stamped on the box like it was a slight second or something. I inspected it with all my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass looking for any obvious signs of damage or scratches, but found nothing. As the B-grade status did not affect the manufacturers 1-year guarantee, I decided to risk it and parted with a crispy £20, from my Christmas stocking, filled with hope and expectation…

All the way home I was fantasising about all the different types of fresh home made bread I would be able to make, free from artificial preservatives, and gunk that goes into your white sliced these days, and the horrible ‘steam-baked loaves that many big manufacturers plump for these days. This is a method of part cooking the bread with steam to speed up the baking process, and then crisping it up with conventional baking at the end. You can always tell if a bead loaf has been baked like this because if you tear a piece off and press it between finger and thumb, it turns back to dough, and has no life in it. A properly baked loaf will ‘spring’ back and retain it’s texture, and structure. If you eat steam –baked bread all the time you are essentially eating part baked dough, which can not be good for you in the long term, will have a bad effect on your digestive system and will generally be a negative factor in the life-health balance.

So with the answer to a long-standing prayer in my possession, I went straight to Safeway’s on the way home, and bought two packets of strong bread making flour, one white and one wholemeal, some dried yeast and some butter, anticipating, hot fresh bread, with lashings of butter and a nice cup of tea…Hmmmnn…!

And now of course you are expecting the comedy results, i.e. a loaf of bread which resembles a house brick, and flour all over the kitchen, and piles of washing up, a loaf which took me all day to make, at ten times the price and completely inedible…well, TOUGH LUCK……, because it didn’t happen.

After my first attempt which on consideration was a little bit on the heavy side but still passable I have been turning out hot crusty bread all week and each one a credit to the baking profession and testament to the skills of the amateur home baker like myself….Baaaaah !

I have tried on many occasions in the past to make my own bread in the past, but to no avail I always end up with the proverbial house brick for one reason of another and gave up many years ago.

THE OVEN

Features

-Bakes a 1kg and 750g loaf

-Choice of 12 bread programmes including jam cake and pasta dough settings

-Compact size ideal for even the smallest of kitchens

-15 hour pre-set timer

-3 crust settings

-Sandwich style loaf

-Rapid bake setting

-Automatic fruit and nut dispenser with beeper

-Power interruption protection

-Viewing window

Modus operandi – (operating method)

Even the simplest of ‘dough-boys’ like me can operate this lil’ beauty. There are a set of recipe suggestions included in the instruction manual ranging from white bread, to wholemeal, French bread and even a TURBO setting, which I will come back to later.

For basic white bread all you have to do is tip 315ml of luke warm water into the bread pan, add a knob of butter, a pinch o’ salt three cups of flour and a couple of teaspoons on dried yeast. Choose the loaf size, and crust colour and switch it on..AND THAT IS IT… ! Bloomin’ marvellous, just my type of machine, now I can go and watch big-brother on channel 4 for the next three and a half hours and come back when it’s done. I notice that some of the celebrities are being made to be servants this series, for the other celebs, well I just got my own lil’ servant to make me bread cakes and even JAM so there, they need one of these in there, but I don’t think Big Bro would let them have one, unless they parade up and down as pantomime characters for a couple of days.

THE SETTINGS
Turbo
This claims to let you have cooked bread in under two hours ”ideal to cater for last minute guests or when you need bread in a hurry” so they say. I found the bread made on this setting rather short and heavy and would not use this setting on a regular basis. It was ok toasted, and I put some into a bowl of soup, and it was passable, but not for sandwiches. You get a kind of ‘trencher’ type loaf, a heavy medieval type loaf, sometimes used as a dinner plate.

Cool Touch Body
Makes it safer when baking bread, particularly when children are present. Some parts of the bread maker do get hot during use such as the viewing window, so some care is still needed. I managed to burn myself on the bloomin’ bread pan getting it out several times.

Vertical loaf .750g – 1kg
This bread maker, in common with most of the other on the market, makes a vertical shaped loaf in two bread sizes ideal for sandwiches. You usually end up with a knobbly bit on the top which you can either have with soup, cut off and make into bread crumbs, give it to the banes with home made jam or a big splodge of butter, or just throw it to the dog, or even feed the birds, but it is a bit of an anomaly at the top of the loaf, and a little creative thinking is required so as not to waste it. You could even give this ‘upper crust’ to any posh people you have coming to dinner, as that is what they used to do in the olden days, however considering that most posh people coming to my house usually get mown down by the specially trained whippets before they reach the front door that won’t be an issue for me. The rest of the loaf is a perfectly formed square sandwich style loaf ready for a variety of bread related possibilities.

Power interruption programme
If there is a temporary power cut during the use of the bread maker the machine will retain its memory and continue baking when the power returns. This allows you to unplug and move the bread maker, and plug it in somewhere else, part way through the cycle should the need arise.

Viewing window
This allows you to watch each stage of the bread making cycle. Watch in hope and anticipation as your lovingly crafted loaf rises before your very eyes, and then watch it sink again into a homogenous blob and bake into a doorstop 2 inches tall and with the same density as a lump of lead. No, actually this has not happened to me yet, as I said I have been very luck so far. I have to say however it is a bit like having a viewing window on the Titanic, as all you can really do is watch the disaster happen from a safe distance, as there is very little you can do about it, even if things do go wrong.

15-hour timer delay
Pre set your bread maker and fresh is ready when you want it. You can even wake up to freshly baked bread. Take care not to add perishable ingredients to overnight programmes as they may go bad before the breadmaker is due to start. You can eggs etc to some recipes, but this would be unwise, if you were setting the timer to come on in eight hours time, as the recipe may have contract salmonella or some such nasty by the time it is ready to start. There is nothing better than waking to the smell of fresh bread in a morning, to toast, or cut into soldiers and have with your freshly boiled egg, or with home made jam, which you can also make in this little machine.

Fruit and nut beeper
Allows you to be more creative with your bread making. The bread maker beeps to let you know when it it time to add fruit and or nuts. This prevents excess crushing during the kneading cycle. I have experimented with adding nuts and stuff ‘all-in’ with the rest of the ingredients, in defiance of the instructions, just to see if they would get mashed beyond recognition in the kneading process, and I have to confess, well yes they did a bit. However the only fruit and nuts I had available were in a Tesco’s own brand fruit and nut Swiss mueseli, which I simply tipped into the mixture at the mixing stage. It was a funny kind of fruit and nut loaf but it did work to a point, and it is the kind of strange thing one is driven to when living on a diet of home made bread and home made soup for a month. I felt almost compelled to yodel in a continental manner after a couple of slices, but resisted, as I saw the postman cycling past my kitchen window and have lost enough previous postage due to similar incidents in the past.

Variety of bread types
Makes any type of bread you like from a selection of settings including basic, wheat, French, damper and sweet. I think this is a good way of making bread for people with special diets like wheat –free, and gluten free etc. you can by the special flours and ingredients online or even at your local health food store, Holland and Barret, do gluten free flour, though I have not seen it anywhere else in the high street.

Crust colour options
Choose from light, medium, or dark crust colours on most bread settings to suit your own personal taste. I like a nice crusty loaf, and my favourite setting is the French bread setting, this always works well with the dark crust option, but it is a matter of personal taste. Experimentation is the mother of invention…

Wheat rapid setting
Reduces completion time of wheat bread ready in a shorter time. I tried this but got a house brick for my efforts, I think I used the wrong type of flour.

Cake setting
Make a variety of homemade cakes using this setting. If I’d known you were coming I’d have baked a cake, baked a cake, baked a cake. If you have the horrible old relatives coming around for tea and cakes on Sunday afternoon for tea and scones, and three hours of interminable grumbling about the ‘good old days’ like we do in Yorkshire, it is something of a tradition, now you don’t have to send out to the bakers for scones and crumpet, you can bake ‘em a cake of your own concoction, in a matter of minutes. It takes approx one hour to bake a cake, which is ample time should you get a list minute call from the ‘crumblys’, that they are coming round to visit, because their central heating has packed up or they have nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon, after church than go and annoy the banes with stories of doodlebugs , and zepplins coming over and bombing the crap out of their vegetable patch in the blinkin’ war years… ahhhhhhhh…! Sunday afternoons…
I made an experimental cake a couple of weeks ago, but used an instant cake mix out of a box, which is recommended in the instruction book, but made the mistake of not putting enough mixture in. I would have needed to add three or four packets, to make a sponge cake capable of feeding the grumbling old gits we get round here of a Sunday afternoon, and all I ended up with was a load of bits, perfectly formed and baked but onl really suitablre to bung in a trife or something, it was not thick enough and simply fell to pieces in my hand. Nicely baked though and will be attempting again the next time the phone rings at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon and the zepplins make their next outing.

Jam setting
Simply follow the delicious jam recipes in the recipe section to make sweet or savoury homemade jams. Never tried it but I may do as I like to be self sufficient and like the idea of putting home made jam in a home made sponge cake. There are some pick your own strawberry fields around where I live in the summer so I will be giving it a bash in the next few months when they all come into season.

Bake settings
Simply follow the recipes to make delicious treats from puddings to a tasty no fuss risotto. Not tried it yet it sounds interesting. I’m not sure I want risotto in my bread making oven though

Damper setting
Make traditional damper style bread in only one hour. This is the heavy kind of bread they made in medieval times, which I believe they used as dinner plates and/or for thwacking peasants over the head with. Not on my priority list.

Pasta setting
Use this setting to make dough for fresh homemade pasta.life is too short to stuff a mushroom or make your own pasta, unless you are Italian mama, or have nothing better to do than watch celebrity Big Brother all day.

Dough setting
Takes the labour out of kneading dough for pasta pizza bread rolls and other breads. I like the idea of using this to make dough and then bake a much bigger variety of breads in the conventional oven. I have tried making dough by hand and then baking it in the oven but only with the traditional results of making house bricks and discus shaped objects unfit for human consumption. The only use I have found for by traditional bread making results is for throwing at posh people passing my house, or coming up my garden path after my ‘upper crust’, before the whippets get ‘em. I now have all the possibilities of baking everything from pizza to pita to French sticks.

Removable lid
Simply remove for easy cleaning.

Non- stick removable bread pan
Non-stick for easy removal of bread and quick clean up. This is a great feature you hardly have to clean the thing at all, just a quick wipe with a damp cloth and you are done

600 watts of power
Optimum amount of power for that perfect loaf of bread.

On/off switch
Located at the rear of the bread maker for convenience. Does what it says…

THE CONCLUSION

Never going to buy another loaf again…

At least that is what I thought. The only bread I have bought since buying this is because I ran out of ingredients and the local corner shop run by the local hillbillies (nutters) ’this is a local shop-for local people’ only sell ‘precious things’ and oven chips, and the Sun newspaper, don’t sell the correct flour or yeast for bread making. I have found supply of the correct ingredients a bit problematic, and you have to go to the big Sainsbury’s near me to get the best deal on flour and easy-bake yeast, to make the bloomin’ stuff.

My advice is to get a stock pile of flour and yeast when you go to the shops as it will keep for a long time and you will not run out of bread in the event of terrorist attack or nuclear war. You can stock pile your flour and easy-bake yeast next to your thousand tins of own-brand baked beans in tomato sludge, safe in your ‘pipe and slippers’, that should the unthinkable happen, and the country is plunged into the dark abyss of food and particularly bread shortages at least you and yours will be supplied with the essential ‘staff of life’ that is your freshly baked crusty loaf. If things get really bad you can always save the stale crusts and empty bean cans to throw at the mutants banging on your cellar door, or better yet invite them in for the best bit of bread you’ll get this side of a nuclear holocaust.

HAPPY BAKING