Our New Bread-Maker - a Paean to Culinary Revolution

Last week Lidl - that bastion of bargain-basement German discounts - had a bread-maker for sale on its deals of the week and as usual I saw it in the weekly flyer a few days before it went on sale. I'd never had a bread-making machine before, always priding myself on being the ultimate bread maker and baker since I'd had no choice in the matter during our years abroad where fresh bread was only feasible when it was home-baked. So it was time to embrace change and go for the techie option.

I think there was a certain element of grandstanding and a little snob value attached to being a slave to the kneading and proving and re-kneading and re-proving and getting a great result wasn't always guaranteed. Certainly in the tropics a lot depended on having quality ingredients which wasn't always a given.

We had flour from wheat that grew in Njombe in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania and a 90kg bag would be brought home whenever we had the chance to visit our Concern friends there in the early '80s (we were then with the Lutheran World Federation in the Burundi refugee settlements in Rukwa Region of Western Tanzania). This sack of wheat had to be sun-dried to rid it of the weevils that invariably invaded the grain. Then it was brought to the local maize mill to be ground into coarse wheatflour. We tried to battle further weevil infestation by milling the wheat in small 5 or 10 kilo batches, and keeping it in the chest freezer. As this freezer tended to chill rather than freeze, as we only had electricity generated for 9 out of 24 hours, it was more a chest fridge than freezer, albeit erratic even at that!

It did keep the flour dormant - or the creepy-crawlies! Nonetheless, we had to sieve the flour prior to making bread or cakes, as there was always the possibility of few rogue larvae camouflaged in the flour. Logic allowed us to eat the bread undisturbed by its parasite potential as we figured it was a) well cooked at high temperature and b) the extra protein couldn't be too bad, and c) lots of people were happily eating such "bush tucker" with no ill-effects and some had a certain cachet in tribal circles - such as the "ssenene" or grasshoppers that were a delicacy ranked with the flying termites in haute cuisine circles.

But I digress - this was supposed to be a post on our new bread maker. Well hubby Jan has taken to it with enthusiasm and it looks like we'll never want for fresh bread again, with all the delicious loaves he's made since Thursday last. I am delighted, as I was always a bit skeptical that a machine could equal or even surpass human endeavour. Here's one big climbdown from this convert - with all the attendant zeal of the convert I am happy to say that I love the bread maker and its produce!

I have watched in amazement at the different through-the-looking-lid stages of the process and it is basically the same stages as human endeavour with all the elbow grease removed. A standard loaf takes about 3 hours to bake from scratch, and includes two or three provings with plenty of kneading; and to my surprise and delight, the wonderful yeasty smell of the rising dough and the baking bread aroma wafting through the house is enough to send any estate agent staging a house for sale into ecstasies!

The machine is programmed to deal with 12 different functions including every imaginable bread type - white, brown, French, gluten-free, sweet, buttermilk, dough, pasta and cake - and then to cap it all it makes jam! I haven't even gone down that route yet but it promises to be great fun trying out all the permutations.

Any of you readers who have bread makers will be familiar with all this magic and have a good laugh at my naive wonder at the scope of our new toy - but I have been enjoying the end results for the past few days, and so too has our old friend Tandy who's visiting from London and Papua-New Guinea for a few days while we bridge the past 16 years since we last met in Tanzania.

She and I (me?) were dab hands at bread baking for all the years it was a necessary task in Africa in the absence of any bakeries in most places, while half-decent bakeries in Iringa were thin on the ground. We had one Greek bakery which made a dense white bread, whose shape was the only resemblance it bore to a baguette. It was nice bread only on the day of baking and didn't reach our exacting standards so our own bread won the day hands down.

Bread is such an emotive food - across religions you have unleavened and leavened bread, Communion bread, bread of life - it epitomises so much and is a food common to all cultures, from the chappati to the tortilla, soda and yeast bread, and breaking bread is a universal gesture of acceptance of the stranger in our midst. Long may it continue to symbolise hospitality and the Céad Míle Fáilte in our house.

The photos show the machine before and after operation, the end product both in and out of the tin and being enjoyed with the ubiquitous cuppa tea, the control panel and the packaging

My cool new kitchen machine!

A few weeks ago my old trusty Philips food mixer died, no doubt from burn-out after a particularly strenuous Christmas and New Year which saw a lot of baking, particularly for the New Year's Eve party we held here at home - see that post for more!

Here is a photo of my cool new Kenwood - and the inaugural muffins!!

The next week when I went to make some buns/fairy cakes, the mixer gave an asthmatic wheeze as if it was trying to muster up some power, and nothing more. So after 9 years of service above and beyond the call of duty for a mere 250watt machine, it had given up the ghost. I had bought it after an earlier (wedding present then 18 years old!) Philips machine mixer attachment suffered meltdown when I left it unattended during bread-making - something the manual warns against but whoever takes notice of the manual until it's too late! A bit of brand loyalty mixed with pragmatism as the dough hooks and whisks from the old machine fitted the new one, worked well with multitasking and keeping down the washing up frequency during a bakeathon!

This time I decided to shop around and get something that would hopefully give many years of faithful service, and when I saw this Kenwood Kenmix 650 in the shop marked down by 15% in these recessionary times, I was hooked. It was about double what I'd originally budgeted for a mixer, but the fact that it was a half dozen machines in one powerful 650 watt motor was enough to convince me anything else would have been a false economy. It has a lot of bells and whistles: namely a blender jug for smoothies and soups, a juicer for apples and other hard fruit and veg, and a citrus juicer; a food processor with some lethal blades and a number of grater and slicing discs that need careful handling or diced and grated finger could have a "bit" part in my next culinary creation!

Back to what I can now do with this wonder machine - I was so busy at work I didn't have the energy to bake during the week so last weekend I made some muffins. I had never made muffins until recently, as I always had the idea they were waayyy more fattening and unhealthy than my default surefire cake - fairy cakes. I am sure these are called other names like cupcakes, but in Ireland they tend to be called fairy cakes or queen cakes. In any case they are all basic Victoria Sponge mix - the same proportions of 4-4-4-2. That's 4ozs each of Flour (self-raising or plain with baking powder), sugar and butter, and 2 eggs. Vanilla or dessicated coconut or ground almonds or lemon or orange zest are all options to jazz them up in different ways!

I often make fairy cakes at 11 o'clock at night on a whim if I want some tasty buns hot out of the oven, there is little to beat them! Then they can be iced or filled with jam and cream or whatever you wish. I often ice them and sprinkle with hundreds and thousands "sprinklies" like here!

I will post the recipe for the muffins I made in my next post, as this is long enough. I made two different types, Blueberry, and Chocolate Chip. They keep for days in an airtight tin, though if you have visitors they won't last daylight! The recipe is from a book called Baking (now there's a surprise!) by Martha Day, which is full of lovely bread and cakes and cookies. I have varied the recipe and it is very adaptable. So I hope you all enjoy them. I got a muffin baking tin, which is deeper than a bun tin, and I get muffin paper cases for convenience, though they aren't essential if you use a non-stick tin.