Despite my penchant for making amazing challah by hand, I put a bread machine on our wedding registry…and wouldn’t you know, someone bought it!
It sat unopened in the box for the last few months until this week when I started to seriously consider using it to make pizza dough. I decided to open the box today and read some of the recipes. They seemed pretty easy and there was even a recipe for challah! Since I’m feeling a little sick (shhh don’t tell McDreamy), and tired, I thought, “why not? let’s give it a try!”.
The recipe they include is not dis-similar to the recipe I use, though they seem to call for less sugar and salt then I use…theirs also wants you to use butter (I substituted oil to make it paerve). According to their recipe, once you dump all the ingredients in and push a few buttons, your challah gets mixed, kneaded, will rise and bake all in the machine without you having to do anything! The downside I guess is that it doesn’t come out as a braided challah and instead is in loaf form (although theoretically I guess you could stop the cycle after it rises and braid it and bake it in the oven, but then that kind of defeats the point right??)….
One very cool feature of this bread machine is a little window that allows you to watch as your ingredients get mixed, your bread rises and gets baked.
This bread maker also has beeping alerts that reminds you when it’s time to add “mix-ins”…since we had some raisins handy, I decided to dump some in during the “mix-in” cycle…this will be my first raisin challah!!!
Since I have never used a bread machine before, I proceeded with caution and stuck to their basic recipe which was included. Next time I think I might give my personal Balebusta recipe a spin a see how it comes out.
Overall I have been impressed by this bread maker in regards to its construction and ease of use…although for someone who has only ever made bread the old fashioned way (by hand, from scratch), it’s probably pretty easy to impress me when I don’t have to do any work but dump some ingredients into a pan and press a button.
The bread is rising as we speak and should be done around 3pm EST…I will update to add a photo and of course, tomorrow night I will update with the taste-test review from McDreamy.
Wishing everyone a good shabbos!
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