I love bread.
I love me some lightly toasted bread with smothered melted butter. It doesn’t matter if it’s 3am and I’m coming home from a gig. I will eat this tiny part of heaven day or night for breakfast or for dinner.
If you haven’t noticed, fresh bread is infinitely better than store bought bread.
Morgan and I have baked bread since we got married. We’ve tried lots of different recipes but could never quite get it right. It’s a 3-hour process and sometimes the result just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort especially for two production professionals who have limited time for food prep.
Until we discovered the break maker.
Saturday, Morgan and I were at a thrift store. We like to bargain hunt. Why buy something for $400 when you can get it for $40? I’m not so much into “things” but I do tools and gadgets that make life easier. My job may be backstage most of the time but Morgan and I run our house like a production and everything from plant maintenance to cooking has standard operating procedures.
Wandering through the thrift store, I came across the kitchen appliance section and noticed a bread maker on the bottom shelf. Now I know what some of you purists are already thinking:
“Jer – don’t you even THINK about it! Homemade bread needs to be made by hand. There’s no way a machine can duplicate the love, blood, sweat, and tears that you must put into a loaf that evokes tears when you bite into it.”
Well, I hear ‘ya. For you purists, know that I’ll continue to experiment with breads but for you production folks who want a shortcut, you have GOT to get yourself a bread maker!
Here’s what I got at my local thrift story and you can as well. Sunbeam Bread maker 5891 – used – $12.99 -Great condition.
CHALLENGE: One loaf of homemade bread baked and ready to eat in 1 hour. Go big or go home. Time is valuable. Mine as well take this new production tool through it’s paces – trial by fire!
Once I got it in the door, I spent 5 minutes printing the manual and reviewing the key safety precautions. (Honestly, no self-respecting New Hampshirite has got time to all of that small print!)
**Tip – the recipes call for “bread flour” and “bread machine yeast”. I didn’t have these available so I used regular white flour and yeast from our jar of Fleischmann’s Active Dry yeast.
***Tip – I also made sure that my water temperature was 115-125 degrees. We happen to own a candy thermometer which I used to check my tap hot water temperature.
Took me 5 additional minutes to assemble and dump the 6 ingredients necessary to take on the EXPRESS BAKE recipe.
Pressed START and walk away.
I knew that I needed to stay busy otherwise I’d be checking this thing every 30 seconds so I laid down on the coach to catch up on an issue of Popular Science.
1 hour later and the DONE beeper on the bread machine goes off. 5 minutes later, I’ve got the best homemade piece of lightly toasted bread smothered with melted butter in my mouth.
So, if you’re a busy person and love bread, take a look at a used bread maker.
I look forward to personally getting into the other recipes for this unit. If you have some favorite recipes, let me know about them.
Life is a Backstage Production 