imple Vegetarian | One less gadget

For most of our married existence, Brian and I have not bought any sliced bread, other than the occasional loaf of a tasty-searching rye or challah off the sale rack. Instead, we trusted our bread device, together with more than one cookbooks dedicated absolutely to bread recipes. Every time we completed off a loaf, we would just choose out a today's range from considered one of our cookbooks and toss the components into the pan. The complete manner took about five mins, which includes cleanup. We enjoyed a number of tasty breads, which includes honey oatmeal, egg bread, sourdough, and raisin pumpernickel. Most of them may want to also be set up the night time time in advance than with the tool on a timer, so we ought to have piping-hot bread looking forward to us whilst we were given up the following morning.

After some time, despite the fact that, the device evolved a problem. It commenced making a horrible squealing noise each time it ran. Brian took it apart and fiddled with it, and ultimately he were given the problem to stop?For a while. But it saved coming returned, and he stored having to take it apart and tighten the identical whatzit, until it reached the factor in which he had to take it aside pretty lots whenever he preferred to apply it. At which factor it became quite clean that this device changed into not a time-saver. After one remaining try very last weekend to repair the component, he declared it officially vain.

So it would appear that our logical next step need to be to seek advice from ConsumerSearch to locate the terrific new bread system inside the marketplace and where to buy it. Unlike the remaining time we attempted to shop for a bread system, once more in 2008, it is genuinely viable to find them in stores in recent times; my guess is that the Great Recession has sparked a resurgence of interest in baking bread at home. And there also are severa primary, reliable models offered on Amazon.Com for less than $100. And for the reason that we loved our bread gadget and used it all of the time, there must be no doubt that changing it'd be a profitable use of money.

So why haven't we?

Well, I think the principle purpose is that my husband surely likes cooking, and baking particularly. I experience it now after which, however if the selection have been solely as a whole lot as me, I probably may have opted for the convenience of being capable of throw a brand new loaf together in a few minutes. But Brian actually enjoys the entire approach of kneading the dough via hand, letting it rise, putting it inside the pans, and pulling them out of the oven. So I think that for him, the death of the bread machine wasn't so much a loss as an excuse to get palms-on with bread dough on a normal foundation.

There's also an economic argument to be made for ditching the bread machine and doing it the old-fashioned way. Way back in the nineties, Amy Dacyczyn (the Frugal Zealot) explored the economics of bread machines in the pages of the Tightwad Gazette. She compared bread-machine loaves to both homemade and store-bought bread and reached the following conclusions:

• Bread-machine bread isn't as tasty as homemade (though it is better than store-bought).
• Bread made in a bread machine takes about five minutes to put together. Homemade bread takes about 25 minutes. However, if you make four loaves at a time and freeze the extras, that cuts your hands-on time to just over six minutes per loaf. (She didn't note how the flavor of fresh bread out of a machine compares to that of a homemade loaf that's been frozen and thawed.) She also notes that using a food processor or an old-fashioned tool called a "bread bucket" to knead the dough can cut the time to about five minutes per loaf. "So," she concludes, "if you have a freezer to store extra loaves and have reasonable physical capabilities, a bread machine doesn't save time."
• An oven takes about an hour to bake a loaf of bread. Running at 350 degrees, an electric oven will use about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) in that time. (Michael Bluejay confirms this figure.) However, baking four loaves at once cuts the energy usage down to half a kWh per loaf. A bread machine uses just slightly less than half a kWh to bake one loaf. So she concluded that using a bread machine, at the then-prevailing rate of 8 cents per kWh, will save you about a penny a loaf in fuel costs; if you use a gas oven, you'll save no money at all.

Now, some of the Frugal Zealot's calculations don't apply to our situation. For one thing, we don't have the freezer space to store more than one loaf of bread, so it isn't practical for us to bake more than two loaves at a time. Also, bread machines have become a bit more efficient; arecent test found that it takes about 0.35 kWh to produce a loaf on the quick bake cycle. And the price of both electricity and gas has gone up. Our latest bill from PSE&G shows that we are currently paying 17.3 cents per kWh for electricity, which works out to 6 cents per loaf baked in a machine. We pay $1.09 per therm for gas, and this chart from Best Buy shows that a gas oven uses about .112 therms to run for an hour at 350. But the upshot is the same: if we bake two loaves at a time, we spend roughly the same 6 cents per loaf as we would with a machine. So a bread machine is not a purchase that would pay for itself, ever, in reduced energy costs. We (or rather Brian) will have to spend more time on each loaf—about 12 minutes as opposed to 5—but it's time spent doing something he enjoys.

Of course, one of the nice things about deciding to bake our bread by hand is that the decision isn't a binding one. If we try it for a few months and find that we miss the convenience of being able to set up a loaf of bread overnight for the next day's breakfast, or have a batch of pizza dough kneading itself at home while we go out and run errands, we can always change our minds and get a machine. Or, instead, we might conclude that a better investment would be a full-sized food processor, one that can process bread dough (and will fit neatly in the space previously assigned to the bread machine). But we needn't be in any hurry to run out and buy anything now. And that fact in itself is actually very reassuring: the knowledge that, even though we used our old bread machine a lot, we can in fact get along without it—that this is one modern luxury that has not, for us, become a necessity.