Great kitchen purchase over the weekend.

[Blub2k]

Got me a Morphy Richards bread maker in Argos, great buy. I love setting it at the weekend for the morning, got up yesterday to fresh bread first thing mmmmmmmm.

[Nick]

lol, i got one too!

had it a while though, a nice stainless steel jobby. The best recipe in there is for the French bread. Make sure you use either strong or very strong bread flour though. Anything else just goes all soggy and tastes underdone. Any dried fast action yeast is good though, I've not seen any difference between a branded or own make yeast, as long as they're fast action.

I did find that the recipes seem to use too much sugar and not enough salt for my taste, so I reversed the quantities. The bread still rose just as well and tasted even better.

Also, I found if I put the bread in the fridge to keep fresher longer, it wasn't nearly as nice as just popping it in an old plastic bread bag and keeeping it in the bread bin.

I made a superb loaf for the Hexus party at the beggining of January. I just added garlic puree, sundried tomato paste, a touch of pesto, dried rosemary and dried thyme to a basic French bread mix. I used olive oil in place of the butter and after the machine had knocked the dough back after proving I added a couple of teaspoons of coarse sea salt. It was bloody gorgeous!