You knead a fair bit of dough to buy one of these butter appears to be a good price for a bread maker that rises above the rest.
Deal has delivery exclusions so you can forget it if you don't live in the eastern capitals.
Next best option is TGG @ $175.20 free pick up or + $10 shipping
Great post. For anyone interested, this is the ducks guts of bread makers. We've had ours for awhile now and it's made consistently great bread, dough (for pizza, focaccia etc.) the entire time, several loaves and doughs per week.
Likewise!
Agreed. Picked up one of those 2nd hand on Ebay recently. It's fantastic. Even gluten free breads come up fantastic.
Agreed - makes great Challah, kneads pizza dough to perfection, quiet and energy efficient due to compact size.
Mine still works as well as the day I bought it (years ago). Highly recommended.
agreed, when it comes to breadmakers, you can't go past the panasonic.
Might be time to upgrade. My 25 year old Panasonic is still going strong but the loaves are tiny. Thanks op.
Looks like the price is back to $199 to me…
It's always been at $199. Use the coupon code CTREAT20
where have you been @aycnrz?
I am waiting for the HD-2501 (high Def) model…
I wouldn't bother you won't even notice the difference with a loaf of this size.
Agree, don't like it when I can see the grains.
I have this breadmaker, by the way. Panasonics are the best you can buy, and they do not normally go on special much. It bakes really well, and also very useful for preparing dough.
These recommendations sound like BS to me. I've had ten breadmakers in the last 20 years because I cook enough bread to wear them out. They last about 18 months with daily use, including a Panasonic one. The main difference is the shape of the bread pan (with some having two paddles) and a bit of difference in the length of the cook cycles, since I regard the fruit/nut dispenser as a gimmick. Sure, you can buy parts but why spend half the cost of a new machine on a bread pan when the motor is old?
BTW you will notice a lot of second hand breadmakers because people buy them and decide they didn't really want one so I am sure they are readily available 'as new' for $20 at garage sales. The best one I ever bought was an Aldi one because with a three year warranty they refunded the purchase price when it lasted nearly two years. Forget the extended warranty.
If you are serious then my tip is to buy your flour in 25kg bags and yeast in 500g lots. I use bread mix but you could save a few bucks using bread flour and bread improver. Whole grain / wholemeal flour will quickly wear the coating off your breadpan.
You run a bakery with a consumer grade bread-maker or you have a big family like 10+ people that eat bread daily ? it is a good advice to buy 25kg flour and 500g of yeast, but how long it take for a standard size family of 4 to restock ? beside warranty I don't think Aldi's one will make better bread than Panasonic, I tried both machines it's like a big gap in between with the same flour.
Have you used the Panasonic one? I have and it is much better than the Breville or Sunbeam models. Of course, they all wear out over time but the Panasonic just makes a better, more consistent loaf.
Let me clarify:
1) Yes I have had a Panasonic breadmaker but not this model and I am not suggesting that the Aldi breadmaker is better but the 3 year warranty certainly is.
2) If making bread daily keep the flour in a sealed container, divide the yeast into two keeping half in a full airtight jar and keep both parts in the fridge. I guarantee it lasts.
We've had a sunbeam and a panasonic - both second hand. Both worked great for several years until the panasonic died. Then the teeth that spin the paddle of the sunbeam sheared off. We made hundreds of loaves in each before they died within weeks of each other.
Then we bought the 2501 - new. It works great too. However it did take a longer time to cook a loaf than the two above, and it required more ingredients too for some strange reason.
Oh - and before all the rest we owned a breville. It was absolutely hopeless and nearly turned us off ever getting another.
Anyway… I don't see what's wise about buying 25kg bags of flour, unless you're getting it cheaper than Aldi 1kg at $0.99 from memory. We did two or three times. But the 25kg bag was more expensive, so it just made no sense. Unless you're getting some special mix - or discount - that you can't get elsewhere.
The panasonic is also foolproof. I think the only failure it ever produced was when my wife forgot to add the yeast. Pity about the alarm though - it's far too quiet, and only beeps a few times. So if you miss it… I'm thinking of cracking it open and seeing if I can do anything to amplify it.
People buying it might want to buy some kind of timer, if they don't have a mechanical one on their stove.
"… cheaper than Aldi 1kg at $0.99 …" (??) bread flour? Which store? My local Aldi doesn't stock it. Is this a once a year thing?
"… only failure it ever produced was when … forgot to add the yeast…" Agree, easily done late at night but you soon learn the lesson.
@flywire: Sorry, I meant their plain white flour. $0.99 for 1kg bags. Or wholemeal. Forget how much that is though, about $1.30 I think. Then make the 'bread mix' up each time - salt, yeast, bread improver… Main stuff only adds cents to per kg of flour.
If I add vegemite and yeast will it yield some booze?
Media Watch got it wrong
University of Queensland molecular bioscience experts say Vegemite can be used to brew alcohol, so long as yeast is added
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/university-of-…
Ah, so you knew before you asked!
Whoever is using Vegemite to brew alcohol is doing it wrong. If Vegemite isn't the source of yeast, then why add it?
Water + sugar + yeast = alcohol
All three ingredients above are dirt cheap and widely available. Vegemite by comparison is very expensive. Yeast is available from almost any supermarket in dried form (look in the baking section). It won't produce 15% booze, but baker's yeast will be good enough for at least 8%.
If anyone in Brisbane wants one, I will sell you mine for $50 or best offer. The wife used it about 5 times in 2 years. The novelty wears off fast. Maybe not the best birthday present - but the steam mop was too expensive.
I'm keen. PM'd.
Replied.
nothing like whitegoods to say i love you…
This is amazing bread maker.. we had few others but this is top notch… good long term machine….
We use ours 3 times a week…
bought it $220 6 months ago~ my wife love it
But what about the bread maker?
did the bread maker love her?
OzB. Taken another "slice" out of my salary.
I had one years ago and waking up to the smell of fresh bread is great.
Please sell me on buying a bread maker? I am trying to convince the wife.
We are a family of five that eats a lot of bread. Why do you love your bread maker?
Buy a bread maker.
Wake up every morning to the smell of fresh bread…
If you use good ingredients it produces excellent bread that doesn't have all the rubbish they put in sliced breads these days.
$1 - $1.20 per 800g loaf using better ingredients.
Pizza dough ready in 45min
We already made a lot of dough for buns and pizza manually, and the only bread we would buy were the large unsliced loafs so we could chop it thick for sandwiches and french toast.
The bread maker removes the manual aspect of kneading and rolling (largely), as it does a great job of proving the mix with a reasonably controlled heat (these make great coffee roasters, too!) and a terrific automatic set-and-forget (some have a timer so you can wake up to bread that has just finished cooking, wonderful smell and magic bread) job of kneading, rolling, mixing etc.
We buy normal Lowan Yeast (the one in the red jar. We keep it in the freezer), a big bag of normal 'bread flour' (in this case, the Laucke 5kg Wallaby Flour. NOTE: NOT bread mix. The mix is fine, but we preferred the bag of just flour for the things we were making.) We make one or two loafs per week, and a similar amount of doughs (for pizza, focaccia, buns etc.) of many types. That is, we use it enough times to reap the benefit of having a machine assist us, but not so much that it feels like a chore or 'another kitchen job'.
So in our case, it was a literal replacement for the manual work we already did, it didn't replace buying supermarket or bakery bread, which is where I think a lot of people go wrong.
Great insights. Thank you.
We actually use ours mostly for making dough and proofing it. We found that the panasonic one does a much better job at it than our previous bread maker, and the knidding also yields better result than doing it by hand.
I do advise to add break improver though, because I do not think home-made bread tastes as good when it's not fresh.
It really is so easy she will kick herself (or you) for not getting one sooner. Recently I tasted some of the more expensive bread from the supermarket. The most BASIC home baked bread (just plain white flour, yeast, and bread improver) tastes better. As for that sub-$1 stuff they sell… YUCK - that should be banned. It really is like a mix of cardboard and plastic after eating bread this one turns out.
You can also eat it warm if you want to.
You don't have to go to the shop just for a loaf of bread, thus wasting fuel, and coming back with $20 of stuff you didn't need.
If someone likes soft crust - someone else likes hard - whatever, just make it.
I had a blueberry cupcake mix in the cupboard. A few weeks ago I poured it into the breadmaker - and made a cake.
You can experiment - banana bread - pumpkin seeds - whatever. Fruit loaf from the supermarket doesn't have enough sultanas? Add more. Or less. Plenty of recipes online, books, if you can be bothered which we usually were not. Too busy eating great plain bread.
Pizza dough.
And yeah - someone said it - the smell. It's just one nice thing that makes a home, and everyone that comes to visit compliments your wife. :-)
Thanks for your answer.
I came for the crumby jokes, and I leave somewhat disappointed
perhaps raisin your expectations to high though I like your pun at the very yeast.
Thanks, I kneaded a bit of cheering up
You guys are giving me a migrain
Is making bread chepaer than buying from the supermarket?
Once you take into account good quality flour, multigrains, electricity etc.
There's a difference between home-made bread and supermarket bread in terms of freshness and taste.
If you're talking about the cost per unit of bread that you produce vs supermarket, of course the supermarket wins (the electricity you have to pay for already accounts for a large portion of the cost of producing the bread, even if it's just water, home brand flour, salt and yeast, the baking process consumes a lot of energy).
Of course, if your argument is from a purely financial point of view, you probably wouldn't buy a bread maker. But if you want a device that makes the work of making bread easy because you enjoy freshly baked bread in your home, that's another story.
For one home-made stuff is a lot fresher and doesn't have all the added improvers that commercially produced bread have. It just contains all the basic ingredients — you control what goes in.
Processing ingredients you'll commonly see are mineral salt 170 (calcium carbonate) and ascorbic acid (food acid 300 or treatment agent 300), otherwise known as vitamin C. Emulsifiers (427e, 481, 471), vegetable gums (412, 461) and amino acid 920 speed up dough handling, help sliced bread retain its shape and extend shelf life by reducing the crystallisation of starch that makes the bread go hard (if you put bread in the fridge, the cold temperature increases the rate of crystallisation and the bread goes hard faster).
Only small amounts of these additives are required – usually up to three per cent of the bread – and bakers often buy them in a ready-made premix, to which they add water and yeast. Most breads, whether from a factory or a small baker, are made from similar premixes – differences generally stem from baking techniques.
source: https://www.choice.com.au/food-and-drink/bread-cereal-and-gr…
if you only use it to make a loaf of bread, no…
if you start making breadtop type bread (dough), pizza dough, noodle dough, making jam, making dried fluffy meat, making red bean, lotus paste, mooncake.
you might.
I follow her on her bread/buns recipe, you can end up baking some crazy good bread.
here's a few
Fancy Bread
here
here
here
here
here
here
Breadmaker can also make
meat floss
meat balls
You can make udon, 150g bread flour, 150g cake flour and 150ml water, 10g salt and use the dough function. Glad wrap and fridge for 15 minutes, make it dry enough to not stick and roll it flat, fold in half and cut into strips. cook for 10 minutes(or until the white bits in the middle is gone) and put into ice water to stop it from cooking. Best udon you will have.
dumpling skins and heaps more…
but really, only if you are passionate about making them, the cost of material to make them would probably just be marginally cheaper than buying it in a bakery, but I found that the bakeries here kinda suck… selection wise.
That said, my homemaker breadmaker from 6 years back is still kicking!
Thank you so much for compiling this! This is the first I've heard of Christine's recipes and they look pretty appetising and simple to follow.
nice post thanks mikkim - and palindrome to boot!
Hm… Don't see the point for meatballs. Quicker to do it in a bowl with your hands - done in seconds, and the same amount of washing up, but without trying to clean meat from under the bread paddle.
And what is meat floss? I can't see what the breadmaker is doing in that video - they start recording after the meat is already shredded… Did it shred the meat!?
Reason they do the meatballs in a bread machine is because it forms a glue with repeatedly mixing the meat, the main difference is the meat will be all mashed up into a paste and the final product will be bouncy and chewy.
meat floss is a weird one, it's basically dehydrated meat with seasoning, more info here.
I only did fish floss to make bread with, as that was the most simple meat floss you could do with the bread machine, bascially draining and chucking canned tunas into the bread machine and using the oil and jam function stir fry it unsupervised :)
here if you are still interested, it skips the pan frying part
@mikkim4eva: Oh, ok - I did see the texture actually, but thought that wouldn't suit meatballs. Whadda i know, lol.
Homer: dough!
Awesome! Thanks OP! I forgot that I'd had my eye on this for quite a while!
I have the Aldi one and its crap.. Half the time there is still unmixed flour in the bottom.
I had a hand me down Palsonic that was better than that.
Should be good!
Your mix is too dry.
Yeah, I tried a bit more water, but i think we were baking small loafs and because the Aldi machine has two mixing blades, flour would stay unmixed on the side walls in the middle. The aldi machine was fine with large loaves.
Nabbed the last one! Now I can use the 20kg bag of spelt flour sitting in my spare room! Thanks OP!
What are the mice going to eat now?
toes
For anyone still looking for one, get it from the GG. Slightly more expensive and plenty of stock.
Buns intended…