My new breadmaker arrived today. It's truly a modern marvel — fully computerized, adjusting the baking cycle to ambient temperature and humidity as well as the temperature of the ingredients. It even has the yeast in a separate compartment, and it adds it at the optimal time for a perfect loaf. By comparison, the old breadmaker I've had for fifteen years — workhorse though it may be — is just a few steps up from a mixer stuck inside an oven with crossed fingers.
I'm baking the first loaf now, it should be ready soon. The baking cycle on the new machine is about twice as long for basic white bread, which puts it right around four hours. The first hour is spent in an "idle" state. There's even an indicator marked "rest" on the display for this part of the cycle. I'm not sure what it accomplishes exactly, but since this is my first loaf, I'm going to try to trust the process a little.
This purchase came as a result of three people in this house now taking sandwiches in for lunch. I found I was making a lot more bread than before, and decided it was time for a) a machine with a greater capacity, and b) something new, since the old workhorse strains a bit in its old age and despite still working, is certainly well past its prime. The new breadmaker can make loaves more than double the size of the old one, the price was decent, and it got pretty stellar reviews across the board, so that was good enough in my opinion.
It's a lot quieter. The old one sounded like a Volkswagen. The new one just kind of hums, though there were some odd pops when it released the yeast from its little optimized prison. Not a big deal, just different. The recipes in the instruction manual call for much less yeast, though, so I've had to tweak my basic bread recipe just a bit. I kind of feel like I can take liberties with my own recipe and forgo the ones in the book for now since I've been making about a loaf a week the last couple of years or so. We'll soon see if I'm wrong.
I'm going to add that I love the manual with this thing too. It has a bread troubleshooting chart with pictures of failed loaves and some possible remedies, and a list of the most common ingredients, a description of what they contribute to the process, and some substitutions to consider. It's kind of like I'm in the advanced class — Breadmaking 412, let's say.
The only thing I don't like so far besides the much longer baking cycle is the lack of a window on top. I like to peek in and make sure everything is going according to plan, and the manual specifically says don't do this because it will really mess up the heating cycle. It's particularly bad this time because it's the first time, and I really want to see what's going on inside.
But... hey, it's done, and it looks pretty good!
