Our daily bread

Today I want to introduce you to my very special friend. I love him very much. He has been with me during the bad times and the good. He is reliable and very little trouble. I bless the day he came to my door in a large brown box via the Home Delivery Network.

I'm afraid the CD at the side is just as naff as you are suspecting

It is my Panasonic SD-255 breadmaker. It is wonderful. Do any of you have one? I cannot understand why every kitchen doesn’t have a breadmaker when we all have microwaves which take up as much room and aren’t nearly as useful. Frankly I think there should be national announcements on News at Ten or an ad campaign like for the digital switchover. I love my breadmaker.

Now, one of my talents is, I am actually not bad at baking. My mum taught me when I was very small, and I can bake nice bread by hand. However. If I had to make all my own bread, I would not eat homemade bread nearly as often, because I do find it a bit of a performance. I know there’s a method where you just spend 5 minutes on it a day, but, even so. We all have different tolerances for these things, and I would rather be sewing, or, boring all you lovely people on my blog. Besides, my breadmaker makes better bread than I do and with the same ingredients (in fact, it uses less yeast). Since I had the breadmaker, I have made at least two loaves in it every week and mostly more. In fact, I use it so much, that I gave the first one I bought to my mum and I bought the version that also makes rye bread (I used to have more money). My mum did that special mother thing whereby you give them something slightly grubby and used and the next time you see it, it is all clean and buffed and shiny and looking better than when you first bought it, and you think, how did she manage that. She makes four loaves a week (I don’t know how they get through four loaves, I have to say. Possibly she sells them on the black market).

If it isn't good enough for the wildfowl i.e. the ducks, it isn't good enough for you

Now, I think you would probably have to go a long way to find someone who would say to you that they found commercial sliced bread completely delicious, despite those silly adverts where a woman reacts in a feeble passive-aggressive way when her husband nibbles her Kingsmill (whereas breadmaker bread genuinely is delicious. The smell!). But, what I didn’t realise, was that it is not just crap because it has been industrially produced and there is some taste-loss-through-scale thing going on, it is produced through a specific industrial method which is quite unlike how bread is produced by hand. Yes, they had to use science to get it to taste that bad. They squash all the grains up, add loads of water, and keep the resulting spongey strange thing hanging together with hard fat and chemicals. It is called The Chorleywood Process (I am not convinced this article is unbiased, however, I always go by the principle with food of, the less processing the better, so, you know). And to make it rise they suck it up. Literally! They apply a vacuum. It makes me think of those pumps to cure impotence. And apparently 80% of commercial bread is produced like this now, so, even if you buy bread from the supermarket bakery, it may have been produced like this and I think often they just bake the prepared dough from frozen (although. I used to work in Tesco bakery years ago and I am sure they used to make it normally, because we had big mixers. However apparently this is not always the case now with all supermarket bread. It does taste pappy to me, much more than it used to).

So I say, avoid Chorleywood dodgy bread, buy a breadmaker, be happy ever after! There are a couple of issues that you might call drawbacks, but which I don't mind: firstly, a standard loaf takes about 4 hours to bake, so you have to plan ahead. I just set the timer and put it on the night before, or, there is a special rapid bake programme which takes just less than 2 hours and is fine. The loaf has a small hole in the middle of the bottom because of the paddle – I just don’t mind this: it is only small.

A bonus picture of choccy cake I made. The white bits in the icing are where I didn't sieve the icing sugar properly and are nothing sinister. Sieve your icing sugar!

You wouldn’t believe the difference having really delicious bread always on hand makes. It changes the way you eat. Boring things like toast and sandwiches become a gourmet meal. You find yourself wanting to do things with your leftovers, like, french onion soup, or bread and butter pudding, just to finish the nice bread. You can make dough in it as well, so you can make pizzas, pitta breads, bread rolls, it is great. I am so much a convert I am like someone who has been Saved and is determined that everyone else is going to be Saved as well. Whether they like it or not.

Here endeth the party political broadcast on behalf of the Go And Buy A Panasonic Breadmaker Party. Look, I just want you all to be happy and have nice sandwiches. It is all I ask. Is that so wrong?