GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Looking for an easy way to bake bread? Need another gadget for your kitchen?
The Hamilton Beach HomeBaker Bread Maker Machine promises to fill your house with the smell of fresh bread. All with the help of their simple machine. But does it work?
Let’s try it!
The Hamilton Beach HomeBaker Bread Machine comes at around $100 and comes with two paddle attachments for the mixer. It was easy to set up. Just rinse the parts and do a quick bake to burn off any weirdness.
First up, we decided to try making a regular loaf of white bread. We followed the instructions from the manual and placed our ingredients in the way they suggested, liquids then dry, with a little nest in the flour for the yeast. We turned on the machine, and away it went. Each cycle gives a loud audible beep to indicate the change.
After three hours of waiting, the final beep of completion alerted us the bread was ready, and the house smelled like delicious fresh bread. But the loaf we were left with was a heavy thick brick. It left us to troubleshoot whether it was the yeast or flour.
As we contemplated that, we moved on to some gluten-free bread. The directions and process for this were a lot more complicated. And the finished result was some gluten-free bread. But it was a little dense.
Finally, we returned to the regular white bread recipe and tried it with bread flour. This seemed to do the trick by producing a nice big fluffy loaf of white bread. It took some playing and adjusting, but the Hamilton Beach HomeBaker bread machine is fully capable of making fresh bread. Now if we can find a way to measure all the ingredients for us!
The positives:
- Makes fresh bread
- Easy to use
- Easy to clean
The negatives:
- Finding the perfect ingredients and recipe is a learning experience
- Takes up a lot of counter space
Overall, we felt the Hamilton Beach HomeBaker Bread Machine could save you some dough in the long run if you like fresh bread or have dietary restrictions. Since it met its claims, we rate this as a “Buy It.”
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