All I kneaded was yeast!! (Morphy Richards 48221 Breadmaker)

Member Name: scattyredhead

Product:	Morphy Richards 48221 Breadmaker
Date:	17/02/02 (1915 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fresh bread!!

Disadvantages: None!!!

I didn’t really want anything for Christmas 2001. It had been a bit of a traumatic year for us so all I really wanted was my family happily back together for the festive period. Well I got that :o), and that was nice.

I also got a new Morphy Richards bread maker, which I wasn’t expecting, and that was nice too! What I also got, that wasn’t quite so nice was a New Year spent rushing from supermarket to supermarket in the area in a vain search for fast acting yeast to feed the aforementioned new toy!

It all started harmlessly enough on Christmas morning. The discarded wrapping paper had been sorted through (recalling the year

I almost chucked away an envelope containing a hundred quid from my Dad!!) and thrown away, the dinner was on the go so…time to have a play with my new toy:o)

It didn’t matter that I was planning to feed the five thousand; we still had to have a loaf of delish homemade bread to eat with it! Ingredients needed for a regular white loaf:

Tepid water…easy enough!
Sugar….in cupboard
Salt…as above
Yeast…always have as I make my own bread lots of the time anyway.
Cooking oil…store cupboard again
Strong flour…see yeast entry.
Dried skimmed milk…ah!!!
Problem. Don’t use the stuff and have never seen the need to store some ‘just in case’.
Problem solved. Hubby despatched to local mini-mart, open for 2 hours on Christmas day morning. This year it was Marvel milk powder instead of batteries!!

Less than 3 hours later we were looking at a small but perfectly formed white loaf, steaming hot, mouth-watering smell, and not one of us able to eat another mouthful! D’oh!

Funnily enough though that by the end of the day the whole thing was gone!

For the first few days of the New Year I was churning out a loaf a day, ranging from simple white through to wholemeal and
cheese and chive and granary, and then I went and ran out of yeast.

No problem thought I, will just collect a few more boxes next time I go to Tesco’s…wrong!!!

I was stunned when I reached the home baking aisle on my next visit there to find the shelf devoid of the stuff?

Not only that area was bare but the strong bread flour bit was empty also. Now call me a snob if you like but I was a little put out!

See have been making my own bread for years, as I mentioned before and I was always more than able to keep my yeast stocks replenished.

Now that the world and his wife seem to have been given bread makers for Christmas there wasn’t a drop of the rising agent to be found for love not for money, not even for die hard ‘kneaders’ such as myself! Pah:o(!!

Ah well I thought, there is bound to be some at Sainsburys so I tootled off there the next day. Wrong! Nor Asda where I was found to be hurtling towards the home baking aisle there the following today, woe betide anyone who got in the way of my demon trolley and me!

Not too disillusioned, although slightly miffed I returned home and consoled myself with another slice of granary and strawberry jam from the last loaf.

Ever the optimist I assumed it would only be a couple of days before the supermarkets took delivery of thousands upon thousands of packets of dried yeasts, wrong again!

It was at least two weeks before I was able to lay my hands on anything resembling instant dried active yeast! In the meantime you can rest assured that we didn’t starve, nor did I resort to going back to buying the flannel consistency stuff of old!

See there is an amazing array of ready prepared bread mixes available these days, never has this Scatty household sampled exotic bread as much as they did in those yeast barren weeks!

One word of warning here, if you did do the same as me and buy a few of thes
e to try remember that they do already have yeast added and that if you decide to mix them with ordinary bread flour, as I did having bought so much of the ruddy stuff, that they don’t ‘knead’ (groan!) extra yeast added.

Yes I discovered that the hard way as one loaf I made appeared to be endeavouring to perform an amazing escape act thru the top of the bread maker! It was quite a sight to behold! Oops I guess I ought to tell you a bit about the bread maker really oughtn’t I?

As I said at the beginning it is the Morphy Richards Essentials breadmaker, and essential it is! I have had my life revolutionised by this, and my fitness campaign stretched to its limit!

Basically it is the same as all the other ones on the market as far as the preparations go. You have to put all the ingredients into the pan in the correct order and in the correct measurements (see problem mentioned in the above paragraph if you don’t!) select the programme you want, switch it on and sit back and wait!

If you are anything like me you will watch it for a while (as I have done with all my new electrical toys, I spent many happy moments in front of my new washing machine when I got it to replace my old twin tub, remember them?)

But after a while you soon tire of that and go off and do something else far more interesting, as is the idea!

There are several settings on my particular bread maker, ranging from: white bread through to granary and including other varieties along the way such as onion and cheese and Italian herb bread.

There are also a heap of other things that it can churn out including. Dough to make raspberry braids, Hot cross buns and Croissants, none of which I have tried yet. What I have tried apart from bread though is the cake recipe. Once. Never again!

I had a bash at making the cherry cake following the standard cake mix recipe. What I ended up with was a slab of cake resemb
ling a very long lasting house brick, and with the consistency of one too!

I said to Will that if I knocked up another thirty thousand or so of these we wouldn’t have to bother with a mortgage, we could build our own place out of these cakes and call it “Cherry cake cottage”!

Even the birds turned their beaks up at it; well I swear they would have done had they been able to! That bit of cake sat in my front garden for over a week before I suspect some less discerning fox made off with it one night! Wonder how far he got with it in his mouth before he gave it up as a bad job!

So back to the bread maker again, well I haven’t really been away from it in reality, see I have made a loaf a day since I managed to stock up on yeast. And supplies staying as plentiful as they are at the mo then I hope to carry on like this.

I haven’t had a bash at setting the delay-baking timer yet. I did pass a cursory glance at it the other night but was too tired to fathom it out. I rather suspect it will come easily once I have done it the once, as setting the thing up for the first loaf did.

I like to experiment with mine, as a result I have found the light crust selection to be my favourite out of the three options, and no prizes for guessing what the other two were!!

The first time I used it I selected the standard white loaf setting, taking 3 hours. There is also a quick bake option too at only 2 hours and twenty minutes; I have found this to be perfectly acceptable for all the white mixture breads I make. Anything to cut some minutes off the baking time!

The machine mixes the mixture for the first twenty minutes of any programme and then beeps at you to remind you to add any additional ingredients that you might want to. Such as cherries in the disaster cake I tried, and herbs etc for the specialty breads.

When the bread is finally ready the machine hails you by beeping at you agai
n, if you fail to get to it the first time it will keep the bread warm and beep at you again after a further 10 minutes.

I believe this will continue for up to an hour to keep the bread warm. I’ve never tested it longer than one lot of beeps; we are usually stood in the kitchen waiting to pounce on it!

So there you have it, in a nutshell! Quick and tasty bread, I was going to say in a fraction of the time that it would take you to make it the ‘old fashioned way’ but if your wont is to make several loaves at a time as I used to, then it won’t really save you any time. But it is the convenience of it that is the main selling point I guess?

I am not 100% sure of the price of my particular machine as it was a present but I have been led to believe that it is a middle of the range one and as far as I am concerned it is more than adequate for my needs.

Yes it only does make one size loaf 1.5kg, but anything smaller would be a waste of time as far as this family goes! Hell this size barely lasts into the next day!

The non-stick surface of the loaf tin is a doddle to keep clean, only needing a quick rinse out when it has cooled and the outer surface of the machine only needs a quick wipe over too. Be careful when the bread is cooking, it does get rather hot to the touch.

One other product I have made more than once since I have had it has been pizza dough. Once again all you need do is add the ingredients in the correct order and amount and leave it to itself for an hour and a half.

After that you have perfect pizza dough to squash onto a baking tray and decorate to your hearts content. A million times better than anything you will get delivered to your door, and that seal of approval comes from my pizza mad teenage sons!

I think that is about it! To sum up: it is a middle of the range bread maker, makes only one size bread, with a variety of programmes such as, basic white, w
holemeal, quick, cake, pizza dough, etc. three choices of crust shade.

It comes with an instruction booklet, easy to read and make sense of, unless you are really dog-tired and the delay timer calculations might as well be written in algebra (remember that? shudder!!) When I do give it a go I will up-date this op.

The instruction also includes some handy recipes. All in all if you follow them you cant go wrong..so I must have made some kind of measurement error with the cherry cake and it wasn’t the bread makers fault after all. Sorry I don’t plan to repeat the experience, I am having far too much fun with bread!

When I dropped the most heaviest of hints I the summer about wanting one of these I truly didn’t think that I was going to get one, thinking that they were going to be way out of our price range and my partner said that we would never use one enough to warrant the cost!!!

He said that about my pie maker too and that is still going strong 8 years later!

I love my Morphy Richards bread maker, I have a feeling it is a love affair that is going to grow and grow, like my waistline if I am not careful, and I am! And at the end of the day it is so nice to know that you are eating as healthy a loaf of bread as you can get, without all the added preservatives and the like.

Just as a little aside;
I have been reliably informed by my Grandma that the loaf I made her kept fresh for almost a week (wrapped up in her fridge) we will all have to take her word for that cos the ones I make for this lot never last longer than a day!

G’won get one, you know you want to!!!
Kazz xx

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