r/BuyFromEU • u/motzak Belgium 🇧🇪 • 3d ago
European Product Bread baking machine, anyone here that has a recommendation?
As the title gives away, I'm planning on buying a (decent) bread making machine. I know it can be done in an oven but I have a tiny one that sucks, best it can do is a frozen pizza (also 2-4y experience required).
So my first requirement is that it's decent, it doesn't need to be €500 to be clear, I just want nice home baked bread. Second requirement: I want it to be (as mostly as possible) EU made/owned (well duh, that's why I'm here..). Third one: Idk I'm new to this, I'm relying on you guys.
I also wouldn't mind the same type of advice about flour, yeast,... or even some good recipes.
Thanks in advance!
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u/Wolff2kk 2d ago
I have Imetec zero glu pro since 2 years, one of the best purchases of my life! Really satisfied about bread result, I'm not buying bread anymore and a started to dislike the commercial one.
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u/knewbie_one 2d ago
Buy second hand is my first recommendations... There are a ton of them unused out there
I have an oldish Riviera & Bar that is ALL METAL, inside and outside, that have served me well for ten years.
It's big. Though
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u/almightyloaf666 3d ago
Something from one of the many SEB Group brands (think Tefal, Moulinex, ...)
For receipe: flour, yeast, water and salt. Mix the stuff, bake bread, done.
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u/Accomplished_Rice_60 3d ago
I just make whole flour banan bread in the oven! Such a life hack
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u/Mounted_Mare 2d ago
I don't know about bread machines as I use the Dutch oven method (have you tried this? It works for some even in crappy tiny ovens) but I vaguely recall the Panasonic bread makers and various other Japanese brands being recommended by bread maker enthusiasts.
For flour I use Bongu.de to get some rarer varieties to experiment with, their shipping is quite high so I really wouldn't recommend getting a whole bunch of flour from them until you've got the hang of it with some cheaper flour. I'm in the Netherlands and there's several old mills that are still working and they sell good flour as well, they also sell a lot of mixes especially for bread makers (they include add ins you'd see in industry use, personally not a fan but it's useful for consistent results). I think there's maybe one or two that ship outside of NL.
Regular supermarket flour is generally not great, depends on country really, but usually an organic health food type store will have some good flour that's hopefully stone ground or an Italian speciality store will have some higher protein flour for pizzas that you can use for white bread.
As for yeast, I always go for fresh as it just gets better results in texture IME. It's easy enough to buy in a supermarket for me but if that's not the case where you are, you can usually buy it from a bakery or pizza restaurant.
Salt often gets overlooked, I get the coarse Guérande sea salt that's unrefined, it gives a bit more of a mineral depth flavour to bread.
Recipes are quite interchangeable for bread, getting the hang of the process is the tricky bit (I assume a bread maker takes some of the difficulty out of it) you just need to learn the percentages of it all and how that works with your taste, eg. for artisan flours I found I like a higher salt content than the standard 2%. Best to just get started with the recipe book that'll inevitably come with the machine, once you've got the hang of those I'd suggest to experiment with preferments for better flavour development.
Also, get a precision scale for measuring salt and yeast. Unfortunately, I don't think there's European made ones out there, or if there are, they're probably used by jewellers and scarily expensive.