Post by Jenny M BensonPost by Mike RuddockI have a Morphy Richards bread maker and I am not happy with it. I
find the recipes absurd: for white bread they require you to use over
2 tablespoons of sugar, which makes the bread taste like cake. My
previous machine (Panasonic) used 1 teaspoonful of sugar and produced
excellent bread.
I knew Umrats favoured the Panasonic but their models seemed to be more
expensive than many others. My sister had recently bought a MR
(slightly cheaper model than mine) and was delighted with it, which
partly swayed me, but I was also influenced by a review by the Good
Housekeeping Institute.
I wonder if one can use recipes from other machines, provided the basics
are much the same - ie the amount of flour fits with the size of loaf
the machine is designed for. One of the reasons for choosing my model
is that it does 4 different sizes and I mostly want the smallest. My
previous machine, a Prima, made big loaves with less sugar but although
I think it must have been good when I first got it about 20 years ago,
it started making inedible bread!
You certainly can use recipes for other machines or recipes from bread
maker recipe books which are designed to be cross-platform. Each machine
will have its own program version of standard, french, wholemeal etc and
it's just a matter of setting the correct program to match the recipe.
I have been buying vitamin c powder from the internet for photographic
purposes and have tried using it for bread making. With my low yeast, no
knead, long rise loaf - which is the nearest thing I do to Jim's
sourdough - it made no difference at all but with bread machine recipes,
a little does a lot.
One note of caution: if, like me, you tend to use vitamin c preparations
to ward off colds, don't bother using the vit c powder in place of
effervescent tablets of the stuff. Without all the tablet's added
ingredients, the dissolved powder tastes absolutely awful.
Nick