*Review* Bread Machine Baking for Beginners by Beth Hensperger

 

Genre: Cookbook

Published: January 10, 2023

Pages: 282

Discover how easy it is to make delicious homemade bread in your bread machine.

With this affordable, abridged edition of the best-selling Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook, learn how to make and bake bread in any brand of bread machine by combining the simplest of ingredients—flour, yeast, water, and salt. Offering complete, easy-to-follow instructions on using bread makers as well as a wide range of recipe variations for making all kinds of loaves, Bread Machine Baking for Beginners is the only book you will need to launch your bread-making success.

Filled with step-by-step photographs, this guide to machine bread baking includes recipes and instructions for everything from white sandwich bread to french baguettes to sourdoughs and seeded breads. Instructions on shaping, decorating, kneading, no-knead breads, and enriched breads are also included.

In Bread Machine Baking for Beginners, you will find:
 

• The basics of bread baking
• Tons of recipes, from the basic to more adventurous, all created with the beginner in mind
• Troubleshooting tips for bread machine–baking issues
• Ways to use your bread machine for other baked goods such as muffins and pizza dough

This book provides the perfect introduction for new bread-making enthusiasts and a great refresher for bread-machine veterans who want to dust of their bread machine.

Put an end to tasteless store-bought bread—use this guide and your bread machine to have fresh, tasty homemade bread instead. It’s easy and it’s fun!

I received a copy of this book through Netgalley. This is my honest review. 

This book has a lot of probably really valuable information for newbie bread machine users, in general. I didn't get the chance to actually test anything out from the book before I lost access to it though. Although I also wasn't in a rush to do so, since my bread machine isn't one of the several brands that this book goes through major features of. That's what I get for having a husband who deeply researched bread machines when I said I wanted one. 

In spite of my specific machine not being mentioned, there was some very useful information in the book about how and why things may go wrong with my bread baking, even using a bread machine that should theoretically be foolproof. Turns out the chemistry can still be affected by the wrong external environment. I'll definitely be buying myself a copy of this book so that I can actually play around with my bread machine with a little more confidence that I'm doing things right. I also really want to try some of the recipes included. 

Overall I give Bread Machine Baking for Beginners 4.753 out of 5 stars. - Katie 

Amazon

Beth Hensperger, a New Jersey native who has lived in California since her teens, has been educating, writing, and demo-lecturing about the art of baking for over 30 years. In the last few years, she has shifted focus to countertop appliance–driven cookbooks that embrace adapting traditional and professional recipes for the home cook: the bread machine, the rice cooker, the microwave, and a four-volume compilation specifically for use with the electric slow cooker, stressing personal creativity in preparation and selection of ingredients.

Hensperger is the author of over 22 cookbooks, including the best-selling Not Your Mother’s series, which includes: Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Recipes for Two,Not Your Mother’s Microwave Cookbook, Not Your Mother’s Fondue, Not Your Mother’s Casseroles Revised and Expanded Edition, and Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook Revised and Expanded Edition, along with the blockbuster first volume, Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook. Her other books include highly-acclaimed titles such as The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook and The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook. She is also the author of The Bread Bible (Chronicle Books), winner of a James Beard Award in 2000. She has twice been nominated for the Julia Child/IACP Cookbook Award.

Hensperger wrote a San Jose Mercury News food column for twelve years, Baking with the Seasons. She is a contributor to dozens of national and online cooking and lifestyle magazines, such as Food & Wine, Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine, Veggie Life, Cooking Light, Working Woman, Victoria, Prevention, and Family Circle, and is a sought-after newspaper and radio interviewee speaking on slow cooking, bread baking, and entertaining. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Visit her website at bethhensperger.com and blog at notyourmotherscookbook.com.