WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE...ER NO!....THE BREAD! (Morphy Richards 48221 Breadmaker)

Member Name: Goldilox

Product:	Morphy Richards 48221 Breadmaker
Date:	18/07/02 (2222 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy Cooking, No Mess, Gorgeous Results Everytime

Disadvantages: Duration of cooking

Nothing is lovelier that freshly baked bread…and the Morphy Richards Essentials Breadmaker certainly helps you achieve fine quality, gorgeous tasting bread! We got ours about a month ago and it has been on non-stop use ever since. It is so simple to use, and along with the instruction booklet couldn’t be more user friendly.

~~~~~ WHAT DOES IT ALLOW YOU TO DO? ~~~~~~~

Don’t be fooled into simply thinking it only makes bread…you couldn’t be far more wrong. You can make so many lovely food items (I will tell you about the one’s I’ve tried later) and they all appear to turn out successfully, no matter how lame a cook you are. As long as you measure the ingredients out exactly to the recipes instructions…you will have a food masterpiece every time.

The breadmaker, on average makes a large (1 ½ lb) 680g loaf. It is slightly smaller than the average shop brought loaf, but it tastes ten times nicer. Anyway…onto the good stuff…what it allows you to make!

Setting 1 – Basic White Loaf
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It takes the breadmaker 3 hours to produce a basic white loaf, and this setting is used to make white bread (obviously) and mixed bread (such as fruit loaves).

Setting 2 – Quick
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The quick setting produces the same items that setting 1 does…but doesn’t take quite so long! The quick setting will bake your bread in 2hours 20mins, although the size of loaf produced will be slightly smaller and not as well risen.

Setting 3 – French
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This produces French white bread (not a stick!), similar to the basic white loaf. It has a much longer cooking time at 3hours 50minutes, but produces finer textured bread with a thicker crust. As it has a longer rising time, it also makes the largest size loaves.

Setting 4 – Cake
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Well believe
it or not, this setting lets you bake cakes. You can bake any type of cake imaginable and customise the recipes to your own tastes. They take 1hour 50mins.

Setting 5 – Wholemeal/wholewheat
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This setting allows you to prepare wholemeal breads. They are lower in volume and have a dense texture in comparison to breads made with white flour, but they are also of a larger size because they are given extra rising time and the dough bakes longer, taking 3hours 40mins.

Setting 6 – Dough
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This setting simply takes out all the hard work in making dough as it automatically kneads and provides perfect rising conditions. You can use the dough in producing foods to be cooked elsewhere, such as pizzas, croissants and bread rolls.

Setting 7 – Extra Bake
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This setting gives you the option to bake your breads for longer, for example if you want an extra hard crust.

You are also given the option to choose the crust colour of your breads. Either light, medium or dark. The breadmaker generally suggests that you leave the crust colour on medium, however I prefer the dark setting because it gives a better structure to the crust making it easier to slice.

~~~~~ SO WHAT HAVE I MADE? ~~~~~~

In this section I will tell you what I have had a go at baking in the breadmaker!

Well of course I have tried making the simple basic white loaf. It has turned out to be very successful each time, with a lovely texture and gorgeous crust. However, one slight gripe is that the bread cannot be stored for as long as shop brought bread (unless you freeze it) as it does not contain the preservatives that shop brought bread does. Chances our however, that the bread tastes so nice…it won’t have the chance to get stale!

Fruit Loaf! The fruit loaves that can be produced in the breadmaker are absolutely amazing!
They taste absolutely lovely and are just delicious when you toast slices of it. This is my favourite bread of all, which I have made in the breadmaker. You simply must give it a go!

My dad made some Tomato & Basil bread and this too was lovely. The flavour was stunning and it looked lovely too. We used some pre-brought Allinson Tomato & Basil bread flavouring for it (places like Asda and Tesco’s sell it) and it made it taste absolutely perfect.

Okay…one cooking disaster I did have was when I tried to make some banana bread. It went all gloopy inside and didn’t rise properly. This was not however the breadmakers fault, it was my own! Lol!

I also made some Sunny Orange bread…although I thought this tasted a little weird. I guess it is an acquired taste…and I guess it wasn’t mine!

Other breads you can make include:

~ Gluten Free bread (for those of you with wheat intolerance),
~ Brown bread,
~ Softgrain bread,
~ Granary bread,
~ Italian herb bread,
~ Cheese ‘n’ onion bread,
~ Olive bread,
~ Sun-dried tomato bread,
~ Peanut butter bread,
~ Chunky nut bread,
~ Malt Loaf,
~ Cranberry nut bread,
~ Chocolate bread,
~ Spicy cheddar bread,
~ 100% wholemeal bread
~ French bread
~ Raisin bread,
~ Mixed fruit bread.

The above are all the types of bread that the instruction booklet gives you the recipes for. However, I’m sure it is simple enough to customise the ingredients (as long as you keep the quantities and proportions correct) to make you own flavours and styles of bread.

~~~~ WHAT I’VE MADE FROM DOUGH ~~~~

As I said earlier, the breadmaker really does take the hard work out of producing the dough for you to make other foods from.

My first attempt was at making pizza…and a lovely pizza was made! Following the instruction in the instruc
tion book, I spread the pizza base out onto the correct sized dish and added all my toppings. When it was cooking however, the size it turned into… Sheeesh!!! It had risen so much in the oven it was f*cking gigantic and was pretty much starting to grow so big that it was near reaching the top shelf of the oven (it was placed in the middle). Anyway…the pizza tasted lovely, even though it took the term “deep-pan” to the extreme! The next time I halve the quantity of dough and the pizza was then a more normal sized thin crust/deep-pan pizza.

White rolls – These turned out absolutely lovely, and with a spritz of Frylight sunflower oil (written about in another of my recent reviews) they achieved a really lovely golden crust and looked so tasty. The texture inside the rolls was gorgeous too, and probably the nicest rolls I have ever eaten.

Croissants! Hahaha…. so they didn’t quite turn out like croissants…they turned out tasting like doughnuts that looked like croissants. I’m sure however, that someone taking a bit more time and putting a bit more effort into making them could manage to produce some lovely croissants. This is probably the hardest recipe of all in the instruction booklet.

Those are the only dough recipes I have attempted at present, but you can also make:

~ Russian kulich,
~ Wholemeal rolls,
~ Raspberry braid,
~ Hot cross buns,
~ Doughnuts.

As noted earlier the Morphy Richards Essentials Breadmaker allows you to make cakes. I haven’t yet tried making any cakes, but I have complete faith that they breadmaker would successfully make these as well.

The types of cakes it has listed recipes for you to make in the instruction booklet include:

~ Gluten free mixed fruit cake,
~ Standard cake mix (whereby you add the ingredients you like)
~ Banana nut cake,
~ Apple & walnut cake.

Overall the
breadmaker gives you the opportunity to make a massive variety of breads and cakes successfully, easily, without fuss, hard work or the mess.

~~~~ ADDITIONAL INFO ~~~~~

The breadmaker is really simple to clean and has a removable paddle in the pan (which does the mixing) so this can easily be removed and cleaned also. The baking pan also has a non-stick surface so it is fairly easy to remove the bread from the pan after it has been cooked. One slight annoyance I find is that when trying to removed the pan from the breadmaker’s main body, the handle sometimes gets stuck to the side of the pan due to the heat. Occasionally you find yourself trying to flip the handle up with a wooden spoon (never use metal utensils in it as they can damage the non-stick surface) so this can get a bit irritating when it keeps flicking from opposites sides of the pan.

The breadmaker is however very sturdy and is easy to keep clean with it wipeable surface and comes with all the usual safety features, such as vents to prevent over heating. Generally a very well made, well-designed breadmaker, which I am sure will last us many many years.

~ Price ~

Okay okay…don’t kill me! We paid absolutely nothing for our breadmaker because we got it on Argos points…but I can tell you that it costs around £63.99 depending on where you buy it. I would easily recommend to you however that that price is worth paying.

The following link contains the correct picture and some additional information.

http://www.newelectricals.co.uk/enter.html?tar get=BreadmakersPrice_Compare.htm l

The instruction booklet can also be viewed from this .pdf file http://www.morphyrichards.com/ib/pdf/48260.pdf

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