Bring Back the Bread Machine
The rise, the fall, the Renaissance
Around a year ago, I came across an article in the New York Times about bread machines. I was six weeks away from having a second baby and sharply aware of what such an event meant for my cooking life when the article ran. Having once eaten eggs on microwaved cauliflower rice topped with barbecue sauce in a postpartum stupor, I was very intrigued by the ease of a bread machine.
I love to bake, but I do not love to bake bread. This is not necessarily for lack of trying. There were moments when I went all in on it. I once came back from San Francisco, bought a little razor, literal house bricks, a spray bottle, and a $20 dutch oven, and embarked on crusty sourdough.
Since then, I have killed exactly two sourdough starters, which, let’s be honest, are more like plants than food and I can’t keep those alive either. All other supplies were lost to the sands of time and desperate, mid-pack purges. We all have our things, and fancy bread is not mine. I respect people who really get into flour and hydration and crust color, but it’s not for me. Sorry, but the fun of baking for me does not lie in its scientific method.
Fancy bread is not the only yeast bread, though, and I’ve successfully made non-sourdough bread on several occasions. Still there were already three—almost four—schedules we were juggling and I just could not add bread to the mix. Sure, it’s just an overnight rise here, a one-hour proof there, but that adds up when there are a combined 3-5 naps a day, daycare pickup, afternoon walk, general hygiene, small scraps of brain space, and so on and so on.
Because of these facts, on a bread-effort scale, my level has been solidly stuck at drop biscuits and quick bread since 2021. Just about the only yeast-based project I’ve embarked upon is this no-knead pizza dough, and I even rushed everyone home from a hike once to deal with that. Not worth it.
But I love bread. Bread with good, salty butter is probably the most perfect food in the world to me. So a machine that kneaded, proofed, and even baked bread sounded way too good to be true.
Bread machines, according to my entirely unscientific methodology of looking at my cookbooks, really peaked in the 1990s.
In fact, bread machines were normal enough, that the vaunted Mark Miller of original Coyote Cafe fame put bread machine instructions for each of his loaves in his 1996 bread book.
And me? I’m rational enough to know that acquiring a kitchen appliance at 8 months pregnant is guaranteed to make it a top-shelf dwelling, dust collector (beside the second spiralizer I have owned in my life, bought at 5 months pregnant). So I didn’t buy one.
Then, about eight weeks postpartum, my mom bought me a huge box of Taste of Home Quick Cooking Annual books (amazing, mom, thank you!), spanning the years 1999 to 2013 from the library bookstore. Couch-bound beneath a sleeping baby, I became engrossed in the world of five-ingredient, canned-soup heavy, dump-and-go cooking.
If you’re not familiar with Taste of Home, it’s home cooks submitting their recipes to a magazine. The headnotes would read something along the lines of “I have [4-10] children and [10-30] grandchildren so when I need dinner on the table fast…” Newly struggling to wrangle just two children, I paid attention.
And in each issue, there was an entire section on bread machines! From under the baby, the lure of fresh bread beckoned. On the fence no more, I dropped around 50 bucks on a sleek little Hamilton Beach number and got to it.
And let me tell you, this puppy lives up to the hype (of 90s cookbooks). It does what it says! It kneads, proofs, bakes, and can be set on a delay. It is a slow cooker for bread. A slow cooker for bread! (I should mention here I also believe strongly in slow cookers.)
And the bread is good. Chewy, yeasty, fresh, charmingly shaped like blobby rectangle. It is just as good as any non-machine yeast bread I’ve ever turned out, albeit in a funny shape.
Picture this: you stick the ingredients for a beef stew in the slow cooker, and do the same for a hearty brown bread in the bread machine at a convenient time. Then, you just hit go, and do whatever you want until it’s time to eat. By dinner, even with the vagaries of children who suddenly do not want to be put down for even. one. single. second. you have an amazing, complete, dead easy meal. Forget AI, this is Rosie the Robot making you dinner, just like in the Jetsons. In this soup and bread heavy era of our life (because my toddler likes soup and my baby likes bread) it is perfect.
Don’t want a blob loaf? It also can just knead and proof for you and you can bake the dough into rolls or pizza dough or whatever. If you’re one of those people who find kneading therapeutic, that’s wonderful—this isn’t for you, but I’m the kind of person who finds actually making and eating dinner therapeutic, and kneading currently precludes that.
So what happened to the bread machine after the 90s? Continuing my rigorous historic research of perusing my Taste of Home Quick Cooking Annual stack, my beloved “Bread at the Touch of a Button” subsection disappears after 2005. Bread maker recipes still make it into the bread chapter, but no longer are they featured. By 2010, as we enter the aughts, the entire “Breads in a Jiffy” chapter is gone. If you remember, it was at this moment in time that our simultaneous carb fear and disdain for cooking shortcuts—arguably non-cheffy cooking in general—are really getting going.
Is that why we collectively abandoned the bread machine? Does anyone know why it happened?
No matter, it has earned a place in my cupboard, unlike the air fryer I returned.
Look, I know this isn’t the hottest take. I mean, I admitted I learned about it from the New York Times, and none other than one Joanna Gaines of the Magnolia Monarchy is also sounding the bugle. But I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus, as someone who has recently tried and tested one in my non-Tik Tok, time-crunched, home kitchen and thinks it is worth it.
If you’re looking for recipes, I’ve tried and liked these rolls from Thriving Home and these ones (Christmas Tree shape optional) from Taste of Home. I’ve also had good luck with The Ultimate Bread Machine Cookbook and the Better Homes and Gardens book pictured above.
And here’s a fun, classic recipe that was a big hit in my house, adapted from Taste of Home Quick Cooking Annual Recipes 2000 (not digitized anywhere I could find):
Salsa Sunset Bread
Ingredients
2/3 cup water (70° to 80°) (+2 tbsp for me)
1/2 cup Greek Yogurt
3 tablespoons chunky salsa
2 tablespoons plus 1-1/2 teaspoons taco seasoning
4-1/2 teaspoons sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons dried parsley flakes
1 teaspoon salt
3-1/3 cups bread flour
1-1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
Directions
Put everything in the bread Machine and hit play. There. You’re done until you eat bread in 3 hours.
FYI, that bread machine makes great jam. Mine has been dedicated to that single use for probably 15+ years. There's no need to stand over the stove stirring and stirring and hoping not to have sticky blobs fly out of the pan and onto the ceiling, walls or your eye.