Is Hamilton bread maker worth it?

★★★★★ Great for making gluten-free bread. First off, I am an experienced bread maker but my one attempt to bake gluten-free bread was an abject failure. My wife cannot eat bread with gluten so after that failed attempt, I resorted to buying store-bought loaves, which were not very satisfying for her, but at least are recognizably bread lol.Fast forward 10 years or so, and those store-bought loaves were getting pretty tiresome, so I did some research and bought this bread maker along with a cookbook (The Gluten-Free Bread Machine Cookbook: 175 Recipes for Splendid Breads and Delicious Dishes to Make with Them by Jane Bonacci). I wasn’t sure how this would work out, and I figured there would be a learning curve but I would get there eventually.I was wrong. The success was immediate.I have now had this bread make for about 3 weeks and I have made bread 8 times; all attempts have been successful, and all but 1 have been delicious (more on that in a minute). The machine is extremely simple to operate: you mix the wet ingredients and put them in the pan, then the dry ones and layer them on top; make a little indentation for the yeast. Close the lid and hit the gluten free setting (#3) and stand back.It takes a few minutes for the paddle to start twirling, which confused me a little at first, but no worries. Once it starts, you need to spend a minute or so with a soft spatula (silicon) making sure that the dry ingredients in the corners of the pan get mixed in with the rest of the batter. After that, you can just go away for a couple hours and come back to fresh bread. It’s really quite remarkable. The loaves are moist, well risen, and very tasty. It’s as close to foolproof baking as I have found for this sometimes-finicky procedure. So far I have made millet bread (once), brown bread (twice), herb sandwich bread (four times) and a cardamom-almond quick bread (twice). My wife is thrilled and so am I, to the point where I hardly eat my regular old store-bought gluten breads anymore.The cookbook offers a couple useful tips that I think are crucial. The most important is to buy a scale to weight your ingredients. Gluten-free cooking is a delicate balancing act, and precise quantities are needed. Filling a cup measure with this ingredient or that can result in widely differing amounts depending on how packed the flours are; humidity (ie., moisture content) will affect this too. So I went to Walmart and bought a sleek kitchen scale for 20 bucks, and I would advise anyone trying this out to do the same.Another thing: the bread machine directions advise you to run the machine at “bake” cycle for 10 minutes and let it cool before using. This allows you to burn off the “factory chemical” smell and it’s crucial I think. Even so, the first loaf I made (millet bread) had a pretty strong chemically taste to it. Fortunately, I had made a second loaf right afterward (the brown bread) and this was much better, so we enjoyed that one. I’m not sure how to get around this–maybe another 10-minute burnoff? Not sure. It’s a minor thing, but worth remembering.As for the ingredients, they are all available on Amazon, or other markets like Whole Foods or even just ordinary grocery stores. You might not get every single ingredient for every single kind of bread at the local market, but hey, that’s what the internet is for.One last thought: Someone asked in one of the questions above whether this machine is “worth it,” meaning, I presume, whether it is worth the money. Well, GF bread costs about $7 per loaf where I live (Massachusetts). So I will need to make 14 loaves before the cost of this machine equals what I would have paid for store loaves. Of course, I will be buying the ingredients too, and they are expensive–so let’s triple the goal to 42 loaves before the machine pays for itself. Right now I am up to 8 loaves, and making #9 today. That’s in three weeks. So I’m guessing that this little experiment will have paid back its cost in about 4 months. When you realize that the loaves it makes are about 2 lbs each, instead of the 1 lb loaves I get at the store, then I will reach the “break-even” point even sooner–about 2 months. (And when you add in the cost of my own gluten-y bread that I have stopped buying because I like the GF stuff so much… well, it’s even sooner than that.)Overall, I am thrilled with this purchase and recommend it to anyone looking to make gluten-free bread. I haven’t used it for anything else and I am not likely to, so I can’t recommend it for that.TL;DR It’s a great machine for GF bread, worth buying.

★★★★★ Great machine for the price. I have now made four loaves of bread with my new Hamilton Beach Bread Maker. And I am never going back to off-the-shelf bread again. I have found nirvana and it is warm bread out of the machine with butter and strawberry jam. This is my second bread maker. My first was an old Panasonic, that worked very well, but it only had one cycle. This machine offers multiple settings, including separate mix, rise, bake, etc. If you are a first time buyer of a bread machine, this is a very good choice. I would also very strongly recommend that you buy Beth Hensperger’s Bread Machine Cookbook (also here on Amazon). The recipes in the machine’s manual are “adequate”. You will get much better results from the recipes in Beth’s book.The Pros:Good price.Does exactly what it is supposed to, makes exceptionally good bread.The mixing, kneading and rising all perform perfectly. The end result was uniformly mixed and cooked.The pan is removable, so it is easy to assemble the ingredients without spilling anything into the machine. (Put the pan on some newspapers when assembling for easy cleanup).The pan locks into place. When you put the pan in, you do so with it rotated about 5 degrees counter-clock-wise, and then twist it clockwise to lock it into place.The machine is very easy to operate. And there is a legend printed on the lid to tell you which each recipe cycle is. There is also an indicator on the panel that tells you which stage the machine is in (kneading, resting, rising, baking, etc).The cord is long enough that you can position the machine in a convenient location.Because of the shape of the baking pan, your end result looks like a traditional loaf of bread. Some machines have a square shaped pan… nothing wrong with that. I just like the aesthetics of a traditional shaped loaf of bread.The Cons:Neither the manual nor machine tells you the time for each phase that the machine is in, so it is hard to know when the first rise is done in case you want to check your dough for too wet or too dry, and adjust the ingredients. (Hint, for the basic cycle, it is about 55 minutes.)The baking element is right next to the backing pan, so that part of the bread will be darker / drier than the rest. It isn’t a big problem, but noticeable, especially on whole wheat bread.The paddle that does the mixing / kneading usually is embedded in the bottom of your loaf of bread. So you have to wait for the bread to cool and then pull it out, which leave a small divot in the bottom of your loaf. What I have been doing is trying to catch the machine just after the last knead phase, remove the dough (and shape it some), and remove the paddle, and then put the dough back into the machine. Problem solved.The top is plastic and seems a bit wobbly. I suppose the plastic helps keep the price down. And it seems to be attached well, so I don’t expect any problems down the road.The unit is fairly light. Again, this is probably to keep the price and shipping costs down. But as a result, the machine might walk across the counter some. I haven’t had a problem with this yet, but I have only made 1.5 lb loaves. The extra weight of a 2 pound loaf might make a difference.Summray: works as expected. I am very pleased with this machine and can happily recommend it, even with the shortcomings noted above.

★★★★★ Fun and easy to use. What a great small bread machine! I use it to make the dough and then bake it in the oven. So much fan. I can’t wait to try some more complex recipes with it.

★★★★☆ Display – no backlight. I just got this delivered and tried it out immediately. The bread (flour rye/wheat mix) came out pretty good.I have to agree with some of the reviews that the display is really hard to read (used flashlight to read) and Hamilton should really look into it. Also the power cord is in a weird place, on the side instead of the back. That’s just my preference.Because of the display I am giving 4 stars but overall it worked pretty well for my first attempt (besides mistake below 🥴)Just a reminder for all newbies:please read the instructions. Me thinking I know appliances, I washed it but didn’t do the step of an empty bake lol! And don’t forget the little kneading part 🤣, I was so excited that I forgot to add it and saw it next to the machine when it already started. After couple minutes in I realized it and made a messy attempt to put it in. Now it’s stuck in my bread 🤦🏻‍♀️.

★★★★★ My old bread maker died, so needed to find a good replacement and I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars. This little machine is great so far! The recipe book it comes with kinda sucks, but there are so many other recipes out there. This machine has lots of different programs to try out. I can’t wait to keep trying out new stuff. Bring on the carbs 🙂

★★★★★ GOOD

★★★★★ I put-off buying a bread machine for ~30 years because reasons, but I am very pleased with this purchase. The dozen+ modes give me every option I could imagine. Pictured here is my first loaf from the machine, using the Parmesan recipe. Because of the single-paddle design, even 1-lb loafs can be rather tall… Luckily I have a wide-mouth (4-slice) toaster, so I can turn the slices on their side. When I did the Maple Wheat I intended to do a 1.5-lb loaf, but accidentally did the 2-lb recipe. It was getting very close to hitting the ceiling of the unit while baking, but even the large size came out to perfection.**I live in Canada, I used “RH” brand bread flour. I used the recipe for the Parmesan bread, and subsequently the Maple Wheat bread recipe, (oh, also the pizza crust recipe) and used the full amounts of flour (3.5 cups for 1.5lb Parm loaf) and (1.5 cups whole wheat plus 2.5 cups bread flour for 2lb wheat loaf) and after the first kneed the dough was perfect, neither too dry, nor too wet. Of course, it’s winter, maybe in the summer time when humidity is up the story will be different, but for now, the “Canadian” alterations of the recipes seem unwarranted to me).I’ve been making my own pizza crust by hand for 15 years. I never got too caught-up in precise measurement of my water and flour, knowing that weather makes a difference. I think I know dough, though, and this machine does a great job of it! Just be warned your first time out that you might need to adjust your flour and liquid amounts, but as I say: 4 for 4 batches so-far using Canadian flour (one batch was a brioche that I made a recipe for on-the-fly) with the “American” recipe and I’m perfectly satisfied.Next order of business, 6 cups of strawberry jam to put on the toast!PS – it’s so nice having control over the rise, too! Now the drafts in my kitchen won’t slow down my bread baking, since the machine has it’s own warm little nursery to get that yeast to it’s happy place!

★★★★☆ Slightly weak. Capacity less then it is said in descriptions.

★★★★★ Muy buena máquina, llevo ya con ella más de un año y super contenta, es fácil seguir las instrucciones y puedes ir modificando recetas a tu gusto.