KBS 17-in-1 Bread Maker-Dual Heaters

When I was about four years old, my grandmother made dinner for the extended family.  She made lentil stew with a large beef bone and chunks of meat, and in the delicious broth she cooked lentils. This was served with homemade brown bread, crusty and warm.  You ate it by dipping the bread into the broth to soak up the juices. It was the best thing I had ever tasted. 65 years later it is a clear memory and my earliest memory of food. No one believed that a four year old would eat fourths, but I did. I decided to buy a bread machine because there is not a single bakery near me, chain store or independent, that produces a good crusty loaf of bread.  Bread brands that, in Fort Lauderdale, have crust, here have brown surfaces that have the same texture as the interiors.  I stopped at a stand that sold Italian sausage and peppers on a bun, and the bun was good and crusty.  I asked the owner where he got the great bread. He said he had it airshipped weekly from Chicago, he could not get good bread locally. So I wasn't the only person who had noticed.  There was no good bread made here. Now this may be just a matter of taste, but my taste finally forced me to bake my own bread.  Periodically in my life I have tried to make bread.  It was always mediocre.  Over or under kneaded, wrong flour. I could buy better bread at the grocery.  My grandmother never used a scale, picked the stuff up on sale.  She would start bread in the evening, wake without an alarm to punch it down, and bake it first thing in the morning so that it took the chill off of the kitchen, and then we could have fresh baked bread for lunch.  I thought it was normal...everyone had hearty, thick sliced fresh baked bread, right? When you had a sandwich in your lunchbox, it was between two slices of heavy tasty brown bread. I never knew how lucky I was. And I can't bake bread. I have tried. So here I am in a dilemma. I know what good bread is, but the local bakeries, either the small ones or the big commercial ones, around here, make crappy bread. If I wanted a loaf that was aught but crustless mush, (or firm crustless bread) I decided I had to bake it myself.   I decided to buy this machine. There was an offer but the reviews were good. The deciding factor is that more than one person reported good experience with customer service. And I feel lucky that I bought this machine. Wow! I used the French bread recipe in the book, but salted butter and less salt, everything weighed.  Boom! Five stars, perfect, crust that you expect on a French loaf. This was bread I wanted to eat. Light, uniform, with a crusty crust. And...fresh hot bread to boot! Wonderful smells, melty butter. My flours were all from Bob's Red Mill.  I used the white flour for the French, and then I tried to make rye bread. I looked on the internet and found some recipes. First try was way too sweet, and the second try was missing something.   Third try hit it right on: 270ml water 22.5 gm light oil (I used light olive) 7 gm brown sugar 180 gm of bread flour 180 gm dark rye flour 6 gm salt 5 gm bread machine yeast 6-12 gm Badia Caraway seeds.   This results in a heavy loaf. If you make a large loaf of French, you need to remove the fruit gadget, because it almost hits the top glass. This makes a heavy square loaf that makes it 2/3 up the pan. I have seen recipes that use chocolate, and 4 times the amount of brown sugar.  I tried one with way more brown sugar. Too sweet. Cake.  I might make a sweet bread someday but when I make rye I want rye bread, not brown sugar bread. This bread had a crust, a great rye flavor, and enough Caraway seeds that they gave me the caraway flavor that is traditional in seeded rye. I have not tried the jam or yogurt or other cycles.  I have used the French cycle for the great light crusty French, and the whole wheat cycle for rye.  It seems like there are few differences in the cycles, but there are differences, rise time, baking time and temperature.  The machine can do three rise cycles but most of the cycles use two, sourdough (which is my next goal) and a couple of others use 3.  You can pick a cycle, a loaf size and crust darkness, but you can't make other adjustments to the cycles.  Then again, I have not needed those adjustments, but the implication is that a "Pro" machine should allow such adjustments, at least to me. If you are a novice at bread baking, get a scale that will measure in grams and will go to 5kg.  Get another scale that will measure in 0.1 or 0.01 gram increments for yeast and salt.  Get a bread box and a cooling rack.  Get a bread knife.  A crappy knife will crush your bread while cutting.  Put your good knife in a knife block, not in a drawer, and not in the dishwasher.  Protect the edge. That is all you need.  Consider a bread box or bread bag. The book that comes with the machine is Excellent. It is written in English (not chinglish). I have no idea what language it was originally written in, but if it was not English, the translation is excellent.  It has decent instruction for many things including how to make a sourdough starter. The instructions are detailed, not cursory. I have found that the bread is easy to get out of the coated pan. I have owned other machines. They would make decent bread. I am a bread novice and now I can make better bread than I can buy. Great bread, good instructions, and (others report) good customer service.  I would like to have a cycle where I could adjust every aspect rather than just a separate timed bake, but honestly I do not need to.  This machine is a buy. Edit: the machine is still a buy but when you make sourdough make the smallest loaf. I tried making a mid sized loaf and it spilled all over the inside of the machine. I cleaned the baked bread out of the bottom with a shopvac, surprisingly easy. I also thought their sourdough was way sweet. If your small loaf works and fits in the loaf pan, then move up.