Who doesn’t love the taste of freshly baked bread made hygienically and conveniently from the scratch? Technology has given us a range of cooking appliances that work alongside in the kitchen as an extra pair of hands without requiring manual intervention. Bread maker is one such appliance, which comes with many pre-programmed options to bake different types of bread according to your needs.
Here are a few features that you should look for if you want to choose the best bread maker:
Advanced Features
The best bread maker should have programmable options other than the basic settings for whole wheat bread, gluten-free bread, pizza dough and sourdough bread. The other features like choosing the color of bread crust and controlling the dough rising time help in baking the perfect bread.
Kneading Paddles
This is one of the basic requirements of any bread maker. You should opt for an appliance that comes with two paddles for better kneading. Remember to remove the paddles once the kneading cycle is completed or else your bread with come with a hole at the bottom.
Delayed Timer
You need to buy cooking appliances for your convenience and having a delayed timer in a bread maker definitely adds to it. Using this feature, you can add the ingredients to the appliance at your convenient time and set the machine to start the operation at the selected time. For instance, if you want to have bread ready when you get up in the morning, you can add the ingredients a night before and set the time for early morning so that when you are up, the machine has the loaf ready for you.
Alarm
Having this feature in your appliance comes handy when you want to add certain ingredients like nuts or fruits at a later stage. Adding them in beginning crushes them during the mixing phase and you will not get the right texture and bite of it.
Besides these features, you need to consider the pricing. You might not like to buy a very high-end sophisticated appliance for home use. All you need is a robust model, which comes with a warranty and good after-sales service
Even after choosing a branded bread maker with all the required features, sometimes you don’t get the desired results. This generally happens not because of any fault in the appliance, but because of not using the right type of ingredients or not adding things at the right time. For instance, flour is the basic ingredient for making any type of bread. Using strong bread flour in place of normal flour will help making better quality of bread as the former contains more gluten.
The other ingredient that has a great impact on quality is yeast. Using old yeast, which was not stored properly or using less than the desired quantity, are some of the many reasons for the bread to not rise properly.
Thus, it’s important to choose the best cooking appliances and then use it properly as per the instructions. Read the user manual thoroughly before using your new bread maker.
