Breadmaker update: one year in!
A little less than a year ago, I asked for your recommendations on bread maker tips, tricks, and recipes, and thought I’d give a small update.
The bread maker I bought is functionally the Breville Custom Loaf, rebranded for the local market (“Tramontina by Breville”). I paid R$3069 for it. It was on sale: the same machine now sells for anywhere between R$2991 to R$3690. (These equate to about 565USD then and 594USD to 732USD now, considering contemporaneous exchange rates.)
My +/- weekly recipe eventually settled upon via much trial and many errors comes from an amalgamation of various sources, by now mostly lost. In the summer, I have to halve the recipe and make bread twice as often, or the maresia / damp sea air makes it mould before we can eat the whole thing!
I have also not tried to make anything but this exact bread since I started. My dreams of raisin buns are as of yet unrealised. Next year for the end of the year, I plan to make panettone in it, as we don’t plan to travel.
My unhalved recipe is:
- 450ml water (filtered, cool)
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 4 cups 100% whole wheat / integral flour
- >1 tsp demerara sugar
- <1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp (freezer stored, instant dry) yeast
- ~3/4 cup walnuts, in pieces, raw, unsalted, to fill the “automatic” dispenser on the machine (sometimes the bulk goods shop by me is out of nuts. the bread is better with nuts, but fine without.)
Cost wise, this breaks down to:
- 500mL olive oil : R$25 (0,75/loaf)
- 1kg flour : R$7 (3,17/loaf)
- 1kg sugar : R$10 (0,05/loaf)
- 1kg salt : R$4 (0,02/loaf)
- 100g walnuts : R$10 (12,50/loaf)
I didn’t include the yeast in the breakdown because I have yet to buy any. The 1kg package of yeast I purchased four years ago to make pizza and kept in the freezer since is still going strong. At present, a kilo of yeast costs ~R$23.
Without nuts, my cost per loaf is R$3,99, while with nuts, it’s R$16,49. My local supermarket sells a (frankly inferior) and much smaller (350g) “100% whole wheat” loaf for R$25.
Having kept incomplete records, I believe for most of the year we have made a loaf about every five days: let’s pretend means over the past year, I’ve made 70 loaves at about a 50/50 split of nuts or no-nuts, so let’s put my total cost of making bread as R$716,80. If we buy bread, it’s an every-other-day occurance, so R$4562,50 spent on bread in a year. Adding the cost of the bread maker to the mix, if these were real figures, we would have saved R$776,70 so far, just in this year alone.
And it has served us well, with some slight oddities!
The first is based on the machine: never once in the usage of the machine has the “automatic” dispenser of nuts automatically added the nuts at the proper stage. I have read the documentation, and I can find no explanation. At present, if I want nuts added, I have to remain at home when the maker is going, as it screams something awful (buzzer) when it’s “going to” add the nuts, and then I run along and poke open the dispenser door with my finger until the latch opens and the nuts dispense into the awaiting dough. If I know I won’t be home, I don’t add nuts, because otherwise, I will come home to a nice loaf of bread and a small dispenser of lightly warmed nuts. (Heh.)
The second is that my recipe is not as good when I have to halve it! In the damp season, I had to throw away a few half-loaves, as mold loves my poor little bread, and the bread does not survive well in the fridge. But splitting the recipe (and altering the settings on the bread maker to reflect, which is itself an imprecise science) has yet to lead to a smaller version of my usual recipe: what comes out is a biscotti-shaped, flat, dense, but still edible loaf. I’m still figuring it out!
All in all, thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the previous thread, and let this be encouragement to anyone else on the fence to try out a breadmaker!
I don't own a bread maker and I have no interest in making my own bread but I still read the whole post because I love stuff like this, especially your price breakdown and overall savings. I hope your bread maker produces warm loaves for many years to come.
thank you! i am often the same when it comes to reading things out of my usual ballpark, and i’m glad you got something out of it. i was impressed honestly with how much we were spending/saving. i didn’t expect it to be so drastic.
Good to hear that you are happy with the machine and your results.
I recently bought an inexpensive bread maker, just to experiment. I've been making bread that isn't entirely whole wheat... the recipe calls for half white flour and half whole wheat flour. I've amended that successfully and now use one cup white flour and two cups of whole wheat flour. This makes a 1 and 1/2 lb loaf. I freeze the bread and thaw out a slice or two as needed.
Until I read the instructions for the machine, I wasn't aware that it could make jam as well. My experiments in this have been interesting, but not entirely successful. Starting with fresh strawberries, and following the instructions, I got something that tasted delicious, but was more along the lines of a strawberry topping. Great on ice cream, but not really a jam. Second batch, this time with pectin, gave the same results. I'm going to try with some blackberries next.
mine also has a jam setting, with its own little paddle. i have yet to try it. i wonder if it can be used to make something like lemon curds…
Apologies for proposing a suggestion without hearing a question on your part, but I ran into a similar issue myself with my homemade bread, and I had a tolerable workaround if it's of interest?
Freezing bread works really well, and it reheats perfectly in the microwave (or a toaster if that was its destination to start with)! Slicing it all at once is a pain, however.
no worries, i am here for conversation. we did try this, but got rid of the microwave when it became clear neither of us were using it except to heat bread. as for a toaster… i actually don’t like toast. 🫢
You can also just take a frozen (half)loaf out of the freezer the day before you're going to need it - no microwave required. If you likely to forget to take it out ahead of time, you can slice it before freezing; the individual slices will defrost pretty quickly just sitting at room temperature.
Thanks for the post. I'm always happy to see bread content.
Apologies for jumping to a conclusion but have you tried weighing your flour and water rather than using cup measurements? If you have a kitchen scale I really recommend using it. Bread is really sensitive to the ratio of flour and water. If you're finding that your half sized loaf is a little temperamental it could be that the natural variance of cup measurements is throwing off your recipie.
And one more throw away comment - I've found that my bread maker doesn't need any additional sugar. All the recipes call for it, but it's doesn't make any difference at all to my final bread and saves me a (tiny) bit of sugar in my diet.
This was the first thing that I thought of. It's a bit jarring to see g/kg and a comma for a decimal point in the comment but then cups and tbs in the recipe. Pick a side, man!
Ha! You may be surprised to know we 🇧🇷 use the comma for the decimals, g/kg in general, but! all our recipes here use cups (xícaras), teaspoons (colher de chá), and tablespoons (colher de sopa, literally soup spoon)!
…though we also use mL now and again for liquids, usually water.
That’s my next step, but finding a good kitchen scale has been a bit of a difficulty. I’ve bought two so far, and one doesn’t tare despite having a tare button and the other eats batteries like crazy. Thanks for the encouragement to get back on the search!
I learned to make bread by hand just a few years ago and still knead manually today, and it definitely has become one of those "I should've learnt this sooner" type of skill. So I'm happy to see another bread maker.
Funny because I had a similar path to yours in that I learned the whole thing just to make a cheap, near unlimited source of thin crust pizza dough anytime. Also haven't tried getting too fancy with things. Settled on a small batch that uses 250g of flour, ~60% hydration which I find is the sweet spot between effort, result and cleanup. Just a normal home convection oven that gets to 250C eventually, don't have cornmeal, still don't have a pizza peel for launching, and still debating having something like an Ooni (make enough pizza but not enough for a dedicated device).
Managed to eyeball a foccacia recipe once because I wanted to use up a bottle of olive oil, still trying to recreate it consistently including compensating for the ambient humidity.
kottke was going on about focaccia recently; i too had a “how hard can it be?” moment that went really well, almost too well. as i told my girlfriend once, the best-and-worst information to learn is how easy it is to make treats: cinnamon rolls, babka, donuts, focaccia…
i think my standard pizza is about the same recipe as yours, though i do have a ceramic pizza thing (it’s not a stone if it’s not stone, yeah?) which is nice if only for keeping a consistent shape. my kitchen is tiny, so no fancies for me (the bread maker is big enough that it has to live in another room entirely).
I just use mine to make Seitan thanks to the Lazy Dave method online. I don’t think I’ve ever made actual bread in it.
I did use it to make Panettone a couple of times which was nice, but years ago.
Seitan is such a nothing effort though, I’m surprised the bread maker is even necessary. That being said, I’m probably missing something so I’ll look up this method, thanks!
It's way more effort than chucking a bunch of stuff in a pan and pressing 'Go'
Fun hearing about other people’s bread adventures. I’ve recently been baking bread for myself as well, but I do a no-knead cold ferment recipe I found on YouTube, works well for my lazy self haha.