If you're new to bread baking, Panasonic's Automatic Bread Maker could be for you. The machine is easy to use and yields seemingly foolproof good results.
The settings are easy to use, and you can use the machine to make white, whole wheat, multigrain or French bread, or even make pizza dough or use the machine on a bake-only setting . The separate yeast dispenser means you don't have to worry about layering dry ingredients over wet ingredients. Instead, yeast is automatically dispensed at the appropriate moment in the process, ensuring perfectly risen bread every time.
Experienced bread-machine users might be disappointed that the control panel does not indicate at what stage in the process the machine is, and that there are no programmable settings for your own recipes. However, there is a "dough only" setting that enables you to use the machine to mix your own recipes, then remove them after the first rise and shape them to bake in a conventional oven.
A problem I encountered is that the loaf sizes in Panasonic's machine are "Medium," "Large," and "Extra-Large," when bread-machine recipes measure loaf size by pounds. Nothing in the manual offered a description of the loaf sizes. A call to Panasonic's excellent customer-service hotline got the answer (A "Medium" loaf is 1 1/2 pounds, "Large" is 2 pounds and "Extra-Large" is 2 1/2 pounds).
While the instruction manual is helpful, the recipes aren't quite as user-friendly. The ingredient measurements for some of the recipes are in strange amounts, like 4 7/16 cups of flour, perhaps due to converting the measurement from ounce measurements (which are also given). If you have a kitchen scale, you'd be wise to use it to measure your quantities.
The Panasonic Automatic Bread Maker can be found for under $130, making it an affordable option for easy homemade bread.
