Review on 🍞 Cuisinart Compact Automatic Bread Maker – Up to 2lb Loaf: New and Improved by Doug Cardello

So glad I bought this when it was quickly selling out due to the Covid19 crisis. I've baked about half a dozen loaves of bread in the last three weeks and have had great results overall. First, I saw several reviews that said the bread maker didn't have a spatula. At first I thought the same - note that the spatula is taped to the inside of the cardboard piece, which protects the manufacturer's inside from scratches. You should make it more obvious as I see people can overlook it and accidentally throw it away. In terms of manufacturer attributes, it looks great on the counter and is compact enough that I wouldn't mind leaving. 24/7 in my small kitchen. I note that I did NOT use the recipes from the book that came with it. They seemed a bit picky and having no feedback on the recipes themselves I didn't trust them. I bought a few bread maker cookbooks that were recommended to me, specifically the Bread Lovers Cookbook. I also found the recipes on the King Arthur Flour website. For those having trouble with the bread machine baking the loaves properly, I believe it could be a bread machine malfunction, but I believe it's more likely that people are measuring incorrectly. or put the ingredients in the machine in the right order. With my first loaf I knew I had measured the amount of water a bit but figured it would be ok, it would be juicier. No, it was too airy (but still not bad)! Next time I did the same with the same recipe and was more precise in the measurements and everything was perfect! Another time my bread didn't rise properly and was dense, but I didn't blame the bread machine - I know I screwed up that time because it was honey bread and I forgot to add the honey to the wet ingredients before that flour was ready. . . added, so I put the honey in last, which I'm pretty sure messed up the yeast activity. However, this bread was still good and edible, but too dense. Another tip I'm going to give is to measure flour correctly. I didn't realize this was an issue for many people, but all flour books make this point, so make sure you know how to measure flour without packing it, too. If there's too much flour, I'm sure the bread won't rise. Conversely, bread books say that if your dough is too wet when kneading, you should add flour during the kneading process in the machine. With my very first loaf, I could see through the window that it was probably too wet, but I was too afraid to disrupt the process. The last bread I made was sweet Hawaiian bread, I could tell it was too wet, so I added flour every few minutes during the second batch until I had a smoother ball of dough that held together. The bread turned out delicious! All in all, learn how to optimize the results of your bread maker and enjoy the baking process and the results!