Something worth saving your Christmas money for!

I am generally the kind of person who prefers thinking to doing, and so most of my pleasures of domesticity are just dreams. I could be tidy and live in a clean and pleasant house; I could bake all my own cakes and biscuits; I could do some gardening; I could remember where I last saw the iron and see if it still works; I could make my own bread - when I've finished planning how to go about these tasks. Well, actually I do manage some of these things for a season: I made my own yoghourt for a good six months once and also made my own bread for a similar length of time. We got fed up with eating cardboard strips of bread, however; the loaves were never the right shape for making sandwiches and it took such a long time, kneading it, waiting for it to rise, cooking it and then doing all the washing up afterwards. The smell was nice, however!

I have developed a strategy for getting the best price from the most reliable retailer for the best product, and all three stages involve the internet. You can spend hours cogitating over these variables, but when, in January ’03, I finally got together enough Christmas money to buy my longed for breadmaker, I did my three-site trick. Regular ciao users will have to excuse me as I wasn't aware of this site then, and my three-site trick will definitely become a four-site trick from now on!

My next call was on Comparestoreprices, which told me that one of the cheapest SD253 breadmakers could be found at an online store called Apollo 2000. My final check was to UK Pricerunner, to check Apollo 2000's rating. It turned out to be not quite the cheapest (by a few pence), but had an impressively high rating out of five, from consumer reviews. I ordered one from Apollo 2000, and although it was initially out of stock, I still had my breadmaker within a week, for £97.19 + £4.99 postage, a saving of around £50 on my local supermarket price. I'm not sure the company is still in business now, as I couldn't find their website or any mention of them on Pricerunner today; but it could be that they've just switched their computers off as it is a bank holiday.

If you look around at the breadmakers on offer, you will find others that do rolls (you have to finish them off in the oven with the Panasonic), and several others that do much larger, or even two, loaves at once. I haven't tried these; all I can say is that if the reviews I read on Beststuff were adamant that this breadmaker was way above all the competition even without those features, then it must be good.

• Waking up to the smell of bread (there is a timer which can be used so long as the recipe doesn't contain items such as meat or milk that could decay during the wait.
• It's easier to get a ready supply of organic flour in the cupboard than a ready supply of organic white bread from the supermarket. They were forever sold out just as I arrived!
• There is a good quality metal pan and everything inside is covered with durable non-stick material.
• You can use the extra ingredients you really like, rather than the speciality breads in the supermarket - pine nuts and cranberries, for example. Everyone I know loves that one! When I made some for a church bazaar, the local pub was coming in and buying it up to sell to their customers!!!
• It's just soooo quick and easy! It takes me twenty seconds to wash the pan (if I soak it for a minute or two first), and then five minutes to put the ingredients in and switch it on. After that the smell will tell me when it's time to get the bread out (as well as the bleeps if I'm near enough).
• That first sight of the gorgeous honey brown top crust lying there, unsullied like fresh snow before you put your boots on it.
• The tremendous variety. You can make cakes in this breadmaker. You can make dough and shape it and finish it in the oven. You can use it for croissants and other exotic delights!
• The raisin compartment is a real help to a better loaf. The problem with adding extra ingredients into the main mix, especially if they are large and sharp, is that they break up the strands of gluten and stop the dough from rising properly. If you cut these pieces up fairly small and put them in the raisin dispenser, they will only disturb the loaf right at the end of the kneading process and the gluten can just grow around them.
• The manual will teach you more than you could ever need to know about bread making. It is well laid out and it is easy to find what you are looking for; there are good, clear line drawings which help to fix the contents of each page in your memory, and information about how to improve your next loaf if things don't work out very well. I now know what adding vitamin C can do for a wholemeal loaf and the function of dried milk powder. This book is an education, as well as a recipe book.
• You get through far less yeast than you do if you make bread by hand.
• You can buy favour with anyone by bringing them a loaf. Except cœliac disease sufferers - but even they can be bought if you use the section of the recipe book that deals with gluten-free flours! And it is so much easier than baking them a cake!
• The French loaf recipe is absolutely the best white loaf. It takes six hours and only comes in the smallest size but is worth it.

• The space under the paddle regularly gets filled with hard bread crusts and needs to be soaked after each baking before the paddle can be released.
• Sometimes flour gets thrown out of the pan into the body of the machine, where it can get baked on (but there is a non-stick coating). If this includes any dried fruit you will see smoke coming out of the back of the machine which could set a smoke alarm off. The book describes this and declares it as harmless - as indeed it turned out to be, but we were really worried until we found out what had caused it.
• The space inside a breadmaker doesn't allow for as much liquid to escape as when a regular oven is used. This means that when you put the loaf out to cool, that 'unsullied gorgeous honey brown top crust' will begin to wrinkle quite quickly. Of course this doesn't affect the flavour or texture of the loaf, but if you want to prevent it you need to put it in the oven for a few minutes or use the 'keep warm' facility for a bit - or simply use less water, though this may adversely affect the texture of the loaf.
• If you want the easy 'stuff in the ingredients, switch it on and go and do something else' type of loaf, you have to make do with the same shape all the time. The shape is excellent when sliced for sandwiches (I have an electric slicer which does a brilliant job on my loaves), but to have a ciabatta that looks as though it's been baked in a trendy flower pot is stretching things a bit!
• The middle few slices always give the game away - that you used a breadmaker. The paddle leaves a long, straight hole starting in the middle of the underside of the loaf and stretching out in one direction. If you're lucky, it goes off sideways so that only the middle slices are affected.
• Well, I suppose this isn't a disadvantage really: the family likes it so much they eat twice as much bread as usually (the cinnamon and pineapple is doing well at the moment) - and they invite all their friends in and polish it all off before the next loaf is ready.
• My hubby likes the Italian loaf with green olives in it - just making it makes me want to throw up! And he's the only one who likes it so it hangs around for ages!
• Sometimes something disappoints - just occasionally - like the bacon loaf which was way too salty.
• Not being able to make rolls and shaped bread automatically - but the extra effort required isn't that much. All you have to do is remove the bread at the end of the rising process; shape it and put it onto a baking tray; place it in a warm place to rise some more for forty-five minutes or so (I just put it in the top oven while I heat up the bottom oven) and then cook it for the time stated in the recipe.