Panasonic Automatic Bread Maker

After more than 6 months of detail research, finally I got my first automatic bread maker.

Yes the researching products were the last 6 month, but the real consideration started over a year ago.

First reason I started to checking around the bread makers was because an experimental baking of my first bread. Following a recipe from internet, the foccacio I made was much successful than I expected for the first time and gave me a huge satisfaction.

But I didn’t think I'll do it again because the shoulder ache I had after kneading the dough for hours.

Then my boss told me that his family have been using one of those machines and they are very pleased by the taste of home baked breads.

Actually my husband had another reason to desire this machine, he started to bake his handmade pizza lately and really tired of kneading dough so frequently.

Then the last year summer, I had a last kick. I realised how tasty the sandwich bread we bought in any super market in Japan when we visit our family there. 

The soft and very smooth texture with slightly sweet bread was so common to me when I was living in Japan and I never thought that was something special and awesome.

But after eating the sandwich bread from T*sco and ASD@ for almost a decade here in UK, I suddenly realised that baking bread myself has all chance that I can have the bread something near to what I used to eat in Japan.

So I researched through the machines and realise that some of Panasonic latest products are similar to the one sold in Japan and I might be able to use some functionalities or recipes available to those machines.

This is what we've got: 

Panasonic SD-2501WXC Automatic Bread Maker

Officially, it was a Christmas present from my husband to me, upon my detailed request :-)

This smart machine has 15 different baking modes (5 of them are variations of other 3 base kinds, plus one baking only menu), then 10 dough modes and 2 jam & compote modes.

It is not totally same but slightly similar to a Japanese marketed product call Panasonic Home Bakery SD-BMS105.

We ordered it through Amazon, and arrived to us on 27th December 2012 (was very quick delivery consider the holiday season): Great for me that I could play with this new toy whole through this holiday.

I'm pretty new to bread baking but I have been baking various cakes for over few decades so I thought it will be a piece of cake. I really under estimated the complexity and depth of bread baking world plus the baking machine complexity.

Actually the baking one of bread from the original menu just as described in the product manual was really simple. Put ingredients following the manual, select a right menu then press Start button. I could select the menu adding more things later etc.

But when I want to bake something what I already have the detail of final product (and the taste) in my mind, that became a totally different story. 

After baking 2 experimental breads, I researched again more than 100 pages of recipes and blogs and manuals in both Japanese and English web sites, I came to a conclusion.

This needs a long term study.

I have no doubt that I'll keep baking breads ever often and I need a research note and record. So I decide this will be my new blog to keep my record of baking breads and may be some other cooking.

I have no intention of bringing a lot of people here to show my recipes but decided to use this blog for my baking records for now. One day this blog might become helpful to other new starters, who knows.