When it comes to breakfast, I am a creature of habit. A banana, some Alpen and a yoghurt all mashed up together does me nicely. My wife’s breakfast varies, depending on how convinced she is that she is on a diet. Right now she thinks she is dieting hard, and has a cup of Ovaltine for breakfast. Totally inadequate, which means she then eats a whole lot more during the course of a day, but there is no point in my telling her. Being Asia, most other meals involve rice or noodles. Overall, there is no place in our daily diet for bread. Which is why we spent 7,000 baht on a bread machine this week.
It was not exactly an impulse buy, we have hovered around them on the shelves for months, and then walked away. I know why I want one. I love the idea of a machine where you stick in a variety of apparently disparate ingredients, leave it to whir and burble for a few hours, and out comes bread. How clever is that?!
There is also the promise of the homely, comforting smell of freshly baked bread. Never mind whether you eat it, just enjoy the smell. I had a similar idea with cats, that they would bring a homely feel to our abode. In reality of course, they claw the furniture, vomit on the carpet and sleep on my head, how homely is that? They do smell nice though.
Still, logic was finally defeated and we came home with a big shiny machine with a few buttons to push and large container to hold the soon-to-be-bread components. Ignoring the recipes contained in the bread maker manual, I popped onto the internet and printed out a recipe for raisin bread. Three hours later and I was burning my fingers extracting what looked like a slightly crumpled brown hat from the steaming machine. One end had collapsed and I searched the manual for resolutions. The answer was to add more liquids, less liquids or alternative quantities of yeast; clearly experimentation would be needed. Cutting a slice confirmed that the bread had a molecular weight equivalent to lead. It needed a considerable coating a marmalade to make it edible.
The next morning my wife proclaimed she would have a go. Once the machine started mixing, the resulting goo looked far too liquid (there is a little window you can look through to study the impending culinary disaster), and she declared the attempt a failure. But three hours later, a fine looking loaf appeared, and a slice did not require a fork lift to carry. She had some with her Ovaltine for breakfast, I am still awaiting a suitable hungry moment to try it out.
I give the bread machine a week before it joins some other must-have kitchen appliances in the dust gathering competition. We never eat waffles, so I think we will get a waffle machine next.
Comments 🔗
2008-05-29| Billy saysYou are a fool. I am a bigger one.
By my inaequate reckoning I have bought, over the years, 15 coffee machines, three Brevel sandwich makers, two whirly things that are supposed to wash and massage one’s feet, innumerable things that cut up vegetables into amazing shapes and something for removing nasal hair. And, yes, a bread making machine. And I could go on.
With one honourable exception, the whole lot were not worth a sh*t and have long been consigned to dustbins scattered across the globe. The exception? my Nespresso coffee machine sitting three paces away from where I am sitting; a perfect cup every time.
2008-05-30| Spike saysNasal hair removal! What a great idea, my next investment.