Traditional Welsh Recipes

Your Guide to Bread Machine Mixes.

by Marion Jones

Do you use bread machine mixes when you make yeast bread in your automatic bread-making machine? If so, why? It is so easy to make gourmet bread quickly from simple bread recipes and so much more flexible too. If you use bread machine mixes you are limited to the bread machine mixes you can find - no matter how many there are.

However, a good bread machine recipe cookbook is far more flexible than bread machine mixes. A good bread machine recipe book will give you about 150 recipes coming from many countries, but it will also encourage you to change those recipes, encouraging you to be creative and develop your own style of bread.

Bread machine mixes are really quite restricting and you have no control over what goes into the bread machine mix either: preservatives, colouring, MSG, salt or who knows what.

Yes, it says on the label, but you cant take them out, if you limit yourself to bread machine mixes. Making bread is really quite simple. Or to put it correctly, the ingredients to making bread are really quite simple.

To bake a very basic loaf of bread, you need only: flour, water, yeast, sugar, salt and fat or oil. The hard part about making bread is the mixing. It can take five hours to mix the bread making ingredients together; to wait for it to rise; to knead it; wait for it to prove; knead it again and bake it.

So, if you have a bread making machine you can automate the hard bread mixing, proving, kneading cycle and if you have a bread-making cookbook you will be provided with numerous recipes to guide and encourage you.

What could be more simple? You consult the bread-making machine cookbook for an appealing recipe; you put the everyday ingredients into the bread mixing bowl of the bread machine and you put the yeast into a time-release box on top of the bread machine; set the timer and just carry on with what you have to do or even go to sleep!

The bread making machine will stir the ingredients and consult the timer. Our bread-making machine has a timer that can be set for sixteen-hours in advance. That means that, if you want your gourmet, yeast bread ready for, say, 7:30 AM, the bread-making machine will mix the flour, water, salt oil and sugar at once, then add the yeast at say, 5 AM, knead, prove and bake the bread and ring the alarm at 7:30 to let you know that your gourmet food is waiting for you.

But you won't need the bell to tell you that. The smell of that fresh bread will fill your house and you will be well aware that your bread making machine is almost ready to deliver one of the best loaves of bread you've ever had in your life. And you won't ever look for bread machine mixes again.

You'll be brimming over with your own bread machine mixes in no time at all and you'll be giving bread away so that you can try out your very own latest bread machine mix. Bread machine mixes? We don't need 'em!