What small electrical appliances (with moving parts or heaters) do you frequently use when cooking? How often do you use them, to cook what, and what should other people know before acquiring or using them? For purposes of this discussion, do not count freezers, refrigerators, stoves, or microwave ovens. Do count things like toasters, blenders, coffee makers, spice grinders, bread machines, food processors, ice cream makers, Vitamixes, electric pressure cookers and frying pans and woks and slow cookers and grilles (and I am sure I left out a few). Which of these are now computerized?66 responses total.
Item 61 overlaps this but also includes non-electric gadgets. I found mention there of things I had never heard along with electric juicer, fryer, can opener, waffle iron, kettle, knife. We have tried most of the above and decided it is easier to use a stove or the non-electric version. Popcorn maker gets used regularly, the electric pressure cooker maybe once a year in hot weather (plugged in outside), electric frying pan if I want to bother digging it out (holds temperature steady), electric wok ditto. Easier to use a frying pan on the stove. Electric hot plate in hot weather. Do the electric versions of things sometimes do a better job than the mechanical ones?
The bread machine gets used 2-3 times a week. I think that's about it for regular use. I've also got a toaster, a blender (more used in the summer), a coffee grinder (used for grinding dried hot peppers from the garden), and a miniature food processor. The most used gadget is a Bodum coffee press, which I use for tea.
Grace should really answer this (& maybe will get to it when she has a chance), but the bread machine gets the workout. It varies, but she'll often use it to make two batches of dough (which get put in standard bread pans & baked in the oven) and sometimes then she lets another loaf bake in the machine. (Besides that this way she can get 3 or 4 loaves made without washing it in between, the oven-baked is better-tasting.) This happens at least 2 or 3 times a week, I think, most of the time. The food processor gets used occasionally, blender & mixer very rarely. We use a toaster-oven as a toaster & occasionally as an oven.
Interesting that you both mention bread machines, as the impetus for this item
was the bread machine I just found for $10 at Kiwanis. (It may have been
donated because the previous owner never thought to clean out the oven). Jim
looked at it and laughed - it makes only half a loaf instead of 2-3. Good
idea about maybe using it just to mix the bread but does it work as well as
hand kneading and is it no harder to clean than a bowl and spoon? How much
actual work (time spent loading and cleaning up) is it for 2 loaves of bread?
Jim sometimes toasts peanuts or almonds in the toaster oven, or cooks a
squash, but the microwave oven is a bit faster at both.
Why is the oven baked better tasting?
Right now not much, this house isn't wired for modern usage. When we get the wiring and kitchen updated or before we moved here we used a few appliances. Bread machine 2-3 times a week, ingredients dumped in and put on "dough" setting which went through first rise and often I would set it back to the beginning of the cycle for another kneading. My machine kneads the dough for about 30 minutes, I can do about 10 on a good day so it gives a much more even texture. We use an electric frying pan often. Coffee mill and coffee pot on weekends and any day I don't have morning class or work. Blender mostly for fruit and milk smoothies a couple of times a month, more often in summer or if STeve or I do the "Slim Fast" type dieting. Popcorn popper 2-3 times a month, toaster 2-3 times a week. Rice maker 2-5 times a week. We got a toaster oven with the house but have yet to use it, have to scrape off all the accumulated baked on grease that my mother-in-law couldn't get either do to no hot water here or the fact that her sight was so bad that she just didn't see it. (May end up getting rid of it instead of fighting with it.) I would use the electric frying pan if I could just find the box that the cord got packed in. It would be easier to use electrical appliances here if the only counter space we have came with outlets. There isn't even one on that wall of the kitchen!
It sounds like you don't even need a stove, with all those appliances! You can get another cord for $1 at Kiwanis Sat. 9-12, hardware dept. And they also have some toaster ovens, pre-cleaned, maybe $5. Jim fixed a blender but has not found any use for it. We were going to make tofu with it (you soak and then blend the beans) but his flour grinder or meat grinder are easier to use. He has a food processor that he converted to process styrofoam cups into wall insulation. For food, we have a couple of shredders (to make borshch and potato pancakes once or twice a year). We have a Squeezo and a Victoria juicer with apple and grape spirals that go inside a perforated cone, and the seeds come out the end and the juice out the sides. What I would like is something easier to use than the hand flour grinder - some day we will hook it up to an exercise bike. Can anyone think of a good design for a bread kneader using the same power source? That might also be hooked up to the juicers and meat grinder and shredders, so we could have both hands free to feed things into them. My kitchen was modernized around 1950 and had three duplex outlets. We plugged in the refrigerator and microwave into one, a clock into another, and a better ceiling light into the third, leaving two outlets for the toaster oven, radio, outdoor extension cord for the hotplate, electric frying pan, etc. Jim added one duplex outlet and I got a stove with an outlet, into which I plugged another ceiling light. Then I put a 3-outlet adaptor into it so we can test boomboxes and get light at the same time. How many kitchen outlets would be ideal?
We just tried out a non-electric crank-type corn popper that Jim found at the curb. It requires oil, but it makes fluffier popcorn than the electric one, and does not produce the same burnt smell. Are there electric appliances that actually produce better results than hand power, or are they just all more convenient?
I suspect it's all convenience, time & muscle-energy saved. I made soap jelly last week in the blender, using the tiny bits left over from a son's attempts at soap-carving, and I'm not sure *how* I would have applied hand power to produce a similar result, but probably it could have been done. When I bake the bread-machine's dough, the result is moister & softer. My texture varies -- for slicing, the machine result holds together better -- but it's as if the machine overbakes it somewhat. Our earlier machines didn't do that so much, and one with adjustments for kind of flour might do better. It takes ten minutes at most to collect ingredients and parcel them out at the beginning of a day's baking (hottish water & honey into the loaf pan, dry ingredients into the pan and also into a separate jar for each intended subsequent loaf), then start the machine. About two hours later, or whenever I notice that the dough is ready thereafter, I grease a loaf pan, dump out the batter, put in warm water & honey & a jar's contents of dry ingredients, & restart the machine. Cleanup is fairly quick if I do it right away, but I'm usually in the middle of something else, so I pull off the dough hook and half-fill the pan with water. Then later cleanup, when all the bits of dough are saturated with water, goes very quickly (maybe a minute). I keep a chopstick on the sink shelf for getting out any dough from inside the dough hook.
I was wondering how the machine could 'knead' dough and perhaps it has to have wetter dough to knead it, and then bakes it longer to dry it out? You could grate your soap by hand, or with one of those crank-type graters that I have, then add water and wait overnight. Or possibly just chop it up a bit with a knife and wait for it to dissolve in water. I was looking at online bread recipes and for a 1 pound loaf you are supposed to add 1.5 cups flour, or 2 cups maximum, or 2.5 cups, depending who you believe, with equally variable amounts of water. It probably depends on type of flour, humidity, etc. The machine insists on being at 65-68 degree but we cannot oblige it so this experiment may fail. The main problem when baking our own bread is finding some place to let it rise. On top of the furnace is one option but you have to prop it carefully. Or in an oven preheated to 150. How does a bread machine get warm enough to rise the bread, without killing the yeast while it is preheating?
A bright bread machine cycles the heating element on & off (probably at a lower power than "bake") to get the right temp. for dough to rise.
Does it actually have a thermostat or is it making assumptions? If our room is 50 will the bread still rise?
Mine has a thermostat. Dunno about yours.
We will take a look. For $10 we don't expect a lot. Does your say you have to have the room at 65-68 degrees?
I should add another appliance that I forgot in my earlier reply, but which gets a workout in our kitchen: the yogurt maker (that refugee from the 1970s).
Mine's got a thermostat. The books lists cryptic error messages for its tiny display for things like "Unable to reach or maintain proper temperature for rising - use in an area warmer than 55 degrees and keep the machine's top closed".
That one does not sound very cryptic, to me.
Ours does not have a display. Jim made bread the usual way yesterday since he was at his house and the bread machine was at my apartment. Maybe we will try it today or tomorrow but we got sidetracked trying to make a 386 board accept a 486 cpu (it goes in but does not run despite setting jumpers as instructed). I have an electric 'natural oven' which means that there is insulation on the outside of the heating element so it requires very little heat. I have used it to bake potatoes, and the metal inner pot can also be used for boiling things. I have a long narrow version for baking bread (probably intented for turkeys). It takes a while to come to temperature as it is low wattage compared to a stove. You can close off the vent hole which makes bread with a crustier crust. I have one with a dial thermostat, and another where you can switch between three heat settings by plugging the plug in three different ways (four prongs stick out of the oven itself). This apparently changes the wattage somehow.
Re: #16 That's the text that the book gives for when the machine's little display is "E:02", flashing on & off.
We have a bread machine with the Williams-Sonoma brand name on it, but I don't know who the real manufacturer is. We use it all the time. We also have an electric can-opener, two electric frying pans, and electric wok, an electric casserole thingie, an electric carving knife, an electric sandwich griller, an off-brand (non-George-Forman) fat- removing grilling device, a couple of mixers and food-processors, a "salad shooter" that I've never figured out, a JuiceMan juice extractor, an electric citrus juicer, two coffee makers, an iced tea maker, a coffee mill, a small U-Line fridge and a U-Line ice-maker under the bar, two microwaves, a Waring blender, and probably other things I'm forgetting. When I started making this list I had no idea we had all that stuff. Some Thoreauvian.
A whole army of electric servants? We gave away my mother's and grandmothers electric can opener and knife and waffle iron and mixer. The bread machine we have took 2 hours 15 minutes. It mixed up our flour and water into not one but two little balls of dough, so I unplugged it and took the dough out and kneaded it by handed into one big ball. I then watched it 'kneading', which involves slamming the ball against the side of the pot for about 20 minutes. A short rise, then it baked on medium and overbaked. It half-filled the pot (possibly because I forgot to put in 85 degree water) and came out like a very hard slightly burnt roll. Next time I will try Light. It was also a lot tougher than hand-made bread and a bit dry.
Which may be the reason that you got it so cheap. If the dough split into pieces rather than one big ball you didn't put in enough liquid, which is also why the bread turned out tough and dry. The rise time on my machine is 60 minutes. If yours is shorted than that the timer may be bad as well.
These are reasons why I don't buy electronics at place like Kiawonas. I buy them new from stores with return policies. Buying used appliances is a bit like buying used cars. They can be ok and work fine, but more often then I like you are just buying someone else's problems that they felt too quilty about or were too cheap to pay the price of throwing away before they bought new, working units.
Bread machines always require you to make a few loaves, watching things and fiddling with the recipe, before they'll do it right automatically. (Sometimes more than a few loaves...) The machine has no sense of how the bread's working out, nor judgement nor ability to make any corrections as a human baker could. Once you've got everything right, though, it can mindless crank out endless consistent good results. (Somewhat like a computer program that way...)
The machine says it is supposed to take 2 hours 15 minutes and it did. This seems rather short to me but it did what it said it would. I will try more water, and warmer water. Since we don't know whether we even want to own a bread machine, $10 seems like a better amount to risk (they said I could bring it back if it did not work) than $100 or whatever the new ones go for. I think I prefer the hand-kneaded double-rise bread we make but this was interesting and we will try a few more times to get it better.
If I have time, I let the machine go through the mixing, first kneading and rising then either take the dough out to hand knead and rise again or restart the dough cycle to go through the kneading and rising again before hand shaping and baking. The only reason I bake in the oven is that most bread in this house is used for sandwiches and the machine leaves a nice hole in the bottom of the loaf where the mixing paddle is. I really don't like it when the filling falls out.
Jim is making another batch of bread. 2.5 cups flour 7/8 cup water (a bit more water than before) and warm this time. He reports that the dough again formed two balls but after a while they coalesced into one. Light instead of medium this time. What is the most flour a 1 pound bread maker can actually mix? We suspect the whole grain flour is not going to rise enough to fill the pan even with warm water - maybe more yeast is needed because of the relatively short rise for this machine? I suppose we could add a bit of honey to accelerate the process.
Every bread machine recipe i've even seen had some sugary stuff added.
Our friend who makes successful whole wheat bread says his machine has a 3 hour or a 5 hour whole wheat cycle. Ours does not. He uses 2 1/4 cups flour, 1 cup water (more than we used) and some honey (to speed up yeast reproduction) and gluten (to make sure it rises higher as the bread machine probably does not knead as well as hands and kneading develops gluten). He also said we could take the dough out after kneading, let it rise a few times in a warm place and bake it in the oven. By that point we may as well make a larger recipe and knead it by hand. I might mix the yeast, water, and honey half an hour before starting the machine to give them a head start.
Appliance that I think we forgot to mention is the crockpot -- we use it maybe once a month, to cook my pot roast (no vegetables, just meat).
My mother did hers in the pressure cooker with potatoes and carrots - this is all she used the pressure cooker for. We made bread this time with warm water, honey and yeast dissolved in the water before adding on top of the flour, but no gluten, machine set to Light. This gave us a full half loaf of unburnt bread. Is there some reason we cannot double the flour, or at least use 3 cups and the medium cycle? Jim thinks the keep warm cycle is so that the bread will not get soggy before you remember to take it out.
Forgot to mention the crockpot. Apropos bread machines: Ours has a small vented compartment in which you can throw extras such as candied fruit. We've never used it, but I once made the mistake of putting my nose right over the vent slots in order to smell that nice rising-bread smell during the rising cycle and got a snootful of some weapons-grade yeast gas. Unbelievably painful. What *is* that stuff?
Yeast gas??? Could be CO2 - was the pain similar to burping through your nose after drinking carbonated beverages? Bread machines have fairly definite limits on how much dough (roughly measured by cups of flour in same) they can handle. Experiment with care.
The fruit dispenser sounds like a bleach dispenser. We will try increasing 1/4 cup at a time. What is the symptom of overload? 2.25 cups produces a loaf half as large as the pan (not half the size of a regular loaf as the pan is only a half-loaf size). I suppose we could also mix all the ingredients together by hand and let them sit for an hour before turning on the machine so it would rise more, but then why use the machine at all? I suspect this one is simply not clever enough to make whole grain bread.
"Yeast gas" might also have some alcohol vapor; doesn't yeast produce alcohol as a waste product? A hot shot of alcohol up the nose would be painful enough.
Jim says this time he put in 2.5 cups flour, and more water, and then he 'threw in breakfast' - so we will have oatmeal bread if it works.
I don't think there could be enough alcohol directly from yeast to cause somebody an inhilation problem, but maybe we're dealing with a hypersensitive nose here. Yeast can live in up to 14-15% alcohol (winemaking), but beyond that you gotta distill. Here's my usual 1 pound white bread recipe for my Panasonic bread machine: 2 1/4 cups flour 1 teaspoon yeast 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon dried milk powder 1 tablespoon oil (I dribble roughly that much olive oil in) 1 cup water
If my nose is hypersensitive it must run in the family, no pun intended. When I cautioned my son not to get his nose too close to the vent he promptly gave the vent a big sniff and five seconds later he clutched his face and doubled over in nose-agony. Whereupon my wife decided to see what the menfolk were carrying on about and despite our shouted warnings she too suffered the fate. I guess nasal hypersentsitivity is not the only thing that runs in the family, although in our defense I must say you wouldn't believe something that painful could come from a bread machine no matter how many warnings are shouted at you.
Re: #33 Ask Jim about overload. (Depending on the design of the machine, it could be anything from poor mixing of the dough to excessive wear on the moving parts to the motor burning out.) Also, you can get a longer cycle with some machines by pulling the plug some time into their cycle, then restarting later (perhaps after the thing forgot where it was, maybe restarting a different cycle). If & how this'll work depends on details of your machine & recipe (probably take lots of experimenting).
I think this one starts all over if you unplug it. We only wanted to let it rise longer, not knead it again (which would make it smaller again). A 2 1/4 hour cycle probably works for white bread. The dough mixes ok but it simply does not have long enough to rise. It also does not seem to keep the rising dough warm and the kitchen is not all that warm now. The machine is a lot quicker to clean up than a bowl and spoon and pan. Non-stick coatings are better than the Teflon my mother used to use. It is not a good idea to add leftover wet oatmeal to a bread recipe - the machine does not seem to overheat, but you get bread pudding.
Today while biking home Jim found another Welbilt bread machine which differs from mine in having a 12 hour timer and a little LED screen instead of lights for setting the baking time. It also differs in missing its blade. A couple hours of searching found me a site that sells these blades for $10-20 depending on the model. Kiwanis sells the same machine complete for that. So we will wait until one of our machines wears out and transfer the blade. The machines are about $90 new, I read. They are popular among people with celiac disease who make gluten-free bread by adding eggs and xantham gum to potato starch and rice and chickpea flour. And who feel stigmatized by having to eat round instead of square sandwiches, believe it or not. Someone else wrote in that the 2 pound loaf was too large but you could freeze half.
What was the website, Sindi? I still need a belt for my Panasonic.
The particular site that I found only sells Welbilt and one other brand, but I ran across several sites that sell appliance parts online. Try a search on bread machine + part + Panasonic or appliance parts. Or see if your owner's manual has a currently working phone numbers. (Ours was disconnected). Or call Sears parts and ask them for a phone number for Panasonic parts. Or try the Panasonic website.
Jim tried out the machine he found at the curb, with the timer. It tells him how much time is left to finish and light med and dark are 7 min apart in cooking time. He used the dough blade from the other machine and the same recipe and procedure and got bread that actually rose and had the texture fos omething other than a wet sponge. It also did not burn on the outside (perhaps because it was 3.5 instead of 2.5 inches high in the pot) and tasted better. So either they improved the technology or the other machine has something wrong with it (maybe itw as supposed to keep warm during the rise and does not?). The pot and gasket on the found machine are beat up so he will rob them from the other machine and then attempt to take the other one apart and get it working with computer control so that he can run each cycle as long as he wants. Has anyone experience with this sort of thing?
Jim has come to the conclusion that the reason the first bread machine was baking unleavened bread is the yeast was sort of old, but he still wants to take it apart to computerize it as an experiment. I should go buy the other one at Kiwanis if I want to make bread at my place, he says.
Kiwanis did not have any bread machines for sale (they get them in often) but
two former electronics customers heard me ask for broken bread machines and
dropped one off on Jim's porch. He found a blown thermal fuse and is trying
to replace it with something similar (different max temp and physical size
since nobody in town carries the right part) from the popcorn popper. This
one will make bread in either 3 or 4 hours rather than 2 hours 15 min, which
should give the whole wheat dough a better chance of approaching the top of
the pan. He has carved a cast aluminum dough blade for the curbside find.
I am supposed to order another 50 pounds of flour.
The blender and juicer just sit there unused. The idea was to make
tofu with them.
Jim reports that his latest bread machine, which he fixed by replacing the thermal fuse with one from the popcorn popper (which is for a higher temperature) seems to have burnt up the motor (or maybe the fuse again?) and it made a bad smell and stopped working. He thinks maybe it does not like his heavy dough and he should have added more water, but he used the usual recipe. Has not taken it apart the see what really happened.
A bad motor may have caused the original fuse to blow.
Jim thinks only if it was overloaded. Too stiff a mix? What other appliance might have a motor that would fit a bread machine?
Another bread machine (with something different broken)? My impression is that those are rather specialized stepper motors.
Maybe he could learn to rewind the motor coil? He already rebuilt a refrigerator starter coil (just cleaned and adjusted it).
resp:14 I wish I could find a yogurt maker. Around here, they are very difficult to find. I wanted my mother to give us her Yogurta, but she said no way-- it had sentimental value, and you can't get it in the States. (She got it in Spain.) I guess we are going to have to beg my grandparents (her parents). Our veggie/rice steamer, our toaster, and our waffle iron seem to get the most work. Sometimes the electric teakettle is used. Everything else is used pretty sparsely. I used to use my Juiceman more, but I've fallen out of the habit.
I am pretty sure you can get a yogurt maker if you really want one. Check out http://www.lucyskitchenshop.com/yogourmet.html
They tend to show up at all the yard sales and rummage sales here for $5, in fact I think we even saw one at the curb recently. Any oven with a pilot light would work but you say WA state is all electric. YOu can also try making yogurt in a closed box with a light bulb for heat (a styrofoam cooler might work, with the pot of yogurt-to-be in it).
resp:52 excellent. It might work. resp:53 I don't doubt it. Yes, WA state is all electric. Don't know about doing it from my own design. Perhaps you could send one? I'll ask my grandparents, first, however.
btw, resp:52 again-- I like how the container is big-- I've seen yogurt makers that did little individual cups (blech) and that's what my grandparents have.
You don't need a design, just a warm spot for the milk with the culture in it to sit in overnight. Near a heat vent might do, in winter, or on a radiator.
not really willing to do that here.
Sounds like bread machines, even broken/refixed ones, were pretty popular a few years ago... Do you still use one these days and how do you like it? What about other electric gadgets in this day and age?
I use mine occasionally but have found that it is easier to just buy bread at the store. But, a person cant get "just baked" bread from the store usually so sometimes there is nothing like having a bread machine.
We can't buy whole grain bread without additives at the store and we are not even near a food store. THe local bakery mixes in white flour.
Can you buy zucchini bread at the store?
Bread without corn products (which my family members are allergic to) is too expensive for us to buy regularly, so I use our bread machine regularly to make dough (5-8 loaves a week, depending partly on whether our older son is in residence). I also use a yogurt maker as needed (1-5 times a month, also depending on whether Jonathan is around).
We have never put any corn products into bread. What corn products are in store bread? Sugar?
high fructose corn syrup (sugar) is a very common ingredient in bread
Immersion blender Analog crockpot with a temperature controller (sous vide, bain marie, rice cooker) George Foreman grill
We just used a hand-cranked shredder to make potato pancakes. It was so much fun we made three times as much shredded potato as we could cook and eat, which considering Jim's appetite is a huge amount. I found it for $2 at a yard sale in the original 50s or 40s box. The rubber suction feet don't stick too well any more.
You have several choices: