Unlike some of the gadgets we’ve bought for the kitchen and don’t get to use (purely because we don’t have the space to keep everything out!), the bread machine is probably one of the most used kitchen ‘gadgets’ along with the George Foreman grill.
Making bread is easy with a breadmaker, and for £40 it’s easily paid for itself. You can keep flour and yeast for quite a while in the cupboards, and even if you run out of bread, 3 hours later you can have a ready made loaf (quicker if you have one of the new fast-bake machines).
I’ve mainly stuck to packet bread mixes since I bought the mixer. Packet mixes work out slightly cheaper than buying a loaf of bread, and the ciabatta packet mix is great for making about 10-12 white rolls, which work out nicer and a lot cheaper than buying a decent bag of rolls from the supermarket. However, recently I’ve been venturing into more untried territory of using strong bread flour and yeast, and essentially cutting the cost of the bread even more.
My first attempt was with some strong wholemeal bread flour. It came out a little dense (but brown bread tends to be denser I find, even from the bakers) but more importantly it seemed a bit tasteless to me and I didn’t enjoy much. I tried a second time, adding a bit more salt and some sugar, as suggested on the packet, but found that the bread came out overcooked (I put it on the wholemeal setting instead of the basic bread setting, which I think was wrong!).
After chatting to my dad, a seasonal bread maker, he suggested mixing white bread flour with wholemeal or multigrain mixes, to lighten the bread. So today I used a third of a multigrain bread mix (as we’d had it for a while) and topped up with white bread flour to get enough ingredients for a 1.5lb loaf, the first time I’ve made a large loaf (usually stick to 1lb). 3 hours later and the results looked impressive, and once the loaf cooled we tried a bit and it’s nice and light and very nice with the grains through it. Only problem to me with it is that again it’s lacking in taste, but I didn’t add any salt at all so I just need to work on getting the right balance of seasoning and then we have perfect bread 
Cheaper than the shops and while it’s waiting to be cooked, much longer lasting!
Incidentally, the recipe and proportions I used were
165g Hovis Harvest Grain bread mix
210g Sainsburys strong white bread flour
1 tsp hovis yeast (slightly out of date but clearly works fine!)
155ml lukewarm water
1 dessert spoon of olive oil
Cook as a 1.5lb loaf on the basic bread setting (took 3 hours exactly).
