Know someone whose bread machine is gathering dust? Get them this book for Christmas.
Beth Hensperger's The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook has 300 recipes for all kinds of bread—from your basic white bread, through all kinds of whole wheat bread, pizza dough and everything in between. Using it, I've been able to consistently make loaves of bread far better than those using the recipes that came with the machine.
Two of her basic recipes, Whole Wheat Cuban Bread and Peasant Bread, have become the everyday breads in our house. (One of the advantages of working from a home office is being able to smell the bread baking downstairs.) Once we discovered how good the basic pizza dough, whole-wheat pizza dough, and cornmeal pizza dough is, we've sworn off the local pizza shops in favor of "rolling our own." While we haven't gone through all 300 recipes, we've probably explored over half of them as we've settled on our favorites.
The book has an Orientation section on the basics, which helps show how her recipes can be adapted to your bread machine. This opening section, as well as other essays throughout the book, explains the finer point of bread ingredients—for instance, all yeast is not alike.
One drawback of a specialty cookbook is that it may call for all kinds of exotic ingredients that you need to search for in gourmet or health food stores. While some recipes in this book are like that (things like whole grain spelt flour or brown rice flour are in a few recipes) the vast majority of the recipes in this book call for ingredients that you can find in any large grocery store. One of the few "secret" ingredient used in many recipes, gluten, is right there next to the flour in my normal suburban supermarket.
While this may not be the ideal gift for someone on a low-carb diet, the pleasure of biting into the chewy crust of some still-warm bread may well cause you to say "To hell with Atkins!"
Article comments
1 - TDavid
Thanks for the tip :) My wife was psyched when I bought her one of these bread machines and she made bread a few times and then the novelty was over and it became one of those dust gathering devices. It's her birthday tomorrow so maybe I'll pick this one up ...
2 - Anita Campbell
Bruce, you've inspired me to get my bread machine out and fire it up again!
What I love best about a bread machine is that I can wake up in the morning to the smell of fresh bread.
Mmmmmmmm.
Just get the ingredients together at night, set the timer to come on VERY early, and voila, one of the most comforting smells to wake up to. It's even better than waking up to the smell of fresh coffee.