Easy Homemade Machine Bread Recipe - FoodLifeAndMoney (2024)

FAQs

Is it cheaper to make your own bread with a machine? ›

Making bread from a machine is marginally cheaper than buying it, as long as you eat bread frequently enough to offset the cost of the appliance. Specifically, I see this as an investment that's smart for households that go through bread quickly, like large families or homes with multiple roommates.

Most bread machine manuals and cookbooks call for bread flour rather than all-purpose flour. King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour, because it's higher in gluten than national brands of all-purpose flour, works perfectly in the bread machine.

One disadvantage of using a bread maker as opposed to your hands is that the paddles are typically fixed, meaning they remain in the dough when baking, often leaving a hole in the middle of the loaf. Whilst this is not the biggest hinderance, it can be an annoyance to those who aim for gold standard loaves.

In a 2017 article for TASTE, Tatiana Bautista argued that a widespread fear of carbs during the late '90s and early '00s led to the bread machine's demise. The gluten-free movement probably didn't help either.

Consistency: Bakeries often use machines to ensure consistent kneading and proofing times. This consistency is key to producing the same soft texture batch after batch. Special Ingredients: Many bakeries use dough conditioners or enhancers, which improve the texture and extend the bread's shelf life.

Does Rising Bread Affect Its Texture? For a fluffy bread texture, the key is to let the bread rise long enough.

Potato Flakes or Potato Water

Starch helps the dough by trapping the gas from the yeast in the dough and makes the bubbles stronger. This helps the bread to rise and be lighter and fluffier. If you are boiling potatoes, you can use the unsalted water in place of the water in your bread recipe to help out the yeast.

This can affect the bread by adding a "yeasty" taste if you put too much into the dough. General amounts of yeast are around 1 - 2 % of the flour, by weight. Too much yeast could cause the dough to go flat by releasing gas before the flour is ready to expand.

- Use bread flour, not regular all-purpose flour for all bread machine recipes. Bread flour contains a higher percentage of gluten than regular all-purpose flour. Using bread flour will produce taller, less dense loaves.

Is it more cost effective to make your own bread? ›

In a nutshell, if you're buying basic, cheap sandwich bread, it's probably cheaper than you can make it at home. But if you compare two loaves similar to what you could make at home — one made with high-quality ingredients as opposed to one made with lesser quality ingredients — home baking becomes much cheaper.

YOU need a lot more dough to buy bread these days.

Some are trying to beat the rise by using breadmakers. Most cost only around 6p an hour to run and ingredients are less than 40p – with a standard loaf at over £1. Paul Murphy, of Currys, said: “Many have turned to breadmakers to save money.”

Time saved: Baking bread can be an enjoyable experience, but if you can't spare the hours to manually knead, prove and mix your dough each time, a breadmaker can significantly speed up the process.

Accordingly, each time I bake at home I save around $2.30. In our household, we go through around three loaves of bread for my kids. That saves us $6.90 a week. Over the course of a year, this saves us $358.80.