What Are Your Alternatives
In our guide to the best bread machines, the older Virtuoso came out on top. However, it does cost much more than the other options on our list. For alternatives, I’d suggest:
- Sunbeam Programmable Bread Maker : The least expensive alternative in our guide, the Sunbeam machine has an intuitive interface and 12 pre-programmed settings. Unfortunately, the recipe book leaves you guessing, and the unit runs quite loudly.
- Oster Expressbake Bread Maker : Another inexpensive option, the Oster bread maker is versatile and user-friendly. However, there are several reports of the machine “walking” across countertops when kneading large loaves.
- Breville BBM800XL Custom Loaf Bread Maker : We think this is the best machine for making unique loaves. There’s an automatic fruit and nut dispenser, 13 pre-programmed settings, and four loaf sizes. But, there are durability concerns, and this unit is loud.
Or, you could just do it the old-fashioned way.
In its review of the best bread machines, “Cook’s Illustrated” recommends making your loaves by hand and popping them in the oven. I did this for years, and the bread does come out delicious. However, when it comes to simplicity, I much prefer a bread machine. If there’s a difference in quality, I haven’t noticed it.
Overall, the Zojirushi Virtuoso Plus is your best option if you want homemade bread with minimal hassle.
Cons: Expensive, must be careful to follow directions closely to get the best results
Making Rapid Raisin Bread
The Zojirushi Virtuoso Plus has a rapid setting that cuts a full hour off its cook time, and I decided to try it out using the recipe for rapid raisin bread. The ingredients were pretty much the same as they were for regular loaves, and included water, bread flour, sugar, dry milk, salt, butter, and rapid rise yeast, as well as the addition of cinnamon. Once I started the program, the machine rested for a shorter period before it started kneading, and it beeped for me to add the raisins after a half hour. When I opened the lid, it simply stopped mixing, and when I shut the lid again, it resumed what it was doing.
With the light crust setting, this loaf was cooked in a little over two hourspretty impressive, if I do say so myself. It was slightly more dense than other loaves and had a more doughy texture, but the flavor was absolutely delicious. Taste-wise, it was my favorite recipe thus far. However, I will say that a lot of the raisins settled to the bottom of the loaf, leaving the top somewhat sparse.
Zojirushi Supreme Vs Virtuoso: The Differences
As you can see, both machines are very similar and share a lot of the same characteristics. One thing to keep in mind is that the Virtuoso Plus is the newer machine of the two, so there are bound to be a few differences.
The Virtuoso Plus was released in 2016, while Supreme has been on the market for a few decades now.
Read Also: Can Dogs Eat Whole Wheat Bread
About This Review And The Reviewer
Camryn Rabideau is a freelance writer and product reviewer who has been testing small kitchen appliances for several years. Shes tested everything from toasters to oil infusion machines, and as an avid baker, she loves trying out any gadgets that promise to make her creations more delicious or easier to bake.
Camryn does her product testing from her small homestead in beautiful Rhode Island. When shes not tinkering around with the latest home gadgets, she spends her time tending to her animals, working in her garden, or crafting.
A Bread Machine That Truly Meets Every Baking Need
From gluten-free to conventional breads to our delicious bread mixes, we turn to Zojirushi. Thanks to double kneading blades, it kneads dough more effectively and with much less user-time and effort than any other appliance we’ve tried. We love using it to make baguettes, dinner rolls, sandwich loaves, pizzas, and more. It’s as simple as putting the ingredients into the bucket, pushing “start,” and coming back 90 minutes later to thoroughly kneaded, beautifully risen dough.
A dedicated gluten-free cycle is designed to add extra mixing to gluten-free doughs, helping develop them so they rise and bake beautifully. All the fully programmable cycles allow you to program kneading, rising, and baking times to suit your recipe. If you’re feeling creative, you can pause the machine after kneading and rising, then remove it and shape and bake in the oven as you please. If you choose to bake a loaf, you’ll have a more traditionally-shaped horizontal loaf rather than a vertical loaf.
Sturdy stainless steel handles make handling and removing the pan easier than ever, and a smartly designed top heating element inside the lid gives loaves golden brown crusts.
Recommended Reading: Temperature To Cook Chicken Pot Pie
Features Of Zojirushi Bb
The breadmakers bottom and lid both have heaters that help the bread bake and brown evenly.
- Double Kneading Blades
Knead the dough thoroughly for the best results. The Baking Pan and Kneading Blades both have nonstick coatings for simple cleanup and bread removal.
- Large Viewing Window
Enjoy watching your bread loaf kneading, rising, and baking through the large viewing window.
Course selection is made easier by a large, simple-to-read LCD Display and a handy key code on the lid.
- Whole Wheat and Multigrain Courses
Use the Whole Wheat or Rapid Whole Wheat courses to make delicious whole wheat bread. With the addition of additional ingredients like nuts and seeds, the Multigrain course has been specifically created to make bread using a combination of whole grain flour.
- Special Courses for Special Diets
You can avoid unhealthy ingredients with the help of gluten-free, salt-free, sugar-free, and vegan courses, which are also specifically created to yield the best results for each type of bread.
- Go Beyond Bread
Think outside the loaf of bread! You have the freedom to prepare a variety of foods thanks to the flexible Dough, Cake, and Jam courses.
- Homemade Course
Use the Homemade course to design your own special course. With the help of three programmable Homemade memory settings, change the knead, rise, and bake times. Cinnamon Roll Bread, Mini White Bread, Meatloaf Miracle, Homemade Pasta, Gluten Free Dinner Bread, and other recipes can be found in the Recipe Book.
Baking Milk Bread In Bread Machine
The machine I use is Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme Breadmaker BB-CEC20. I chose this machine because it has customizable functions for kneading, rise and baking. Also a 2 lb loaf capacity plus great reviews! If you need one, you can buy it from my amazon storeHERE.
There are a few things that are different when baking milk bread in the bread machine
- Add WET ingredients -> then DRY ingredients on top of the liquid when adding ingredients in the pan. Not a must for all machines but this ensures the most successful result.
- Because each bread machine is different, you may have to adjust the recipe to your situation. You need 3 cycles for this recipe. If you dont have custom rise or dough capability, I suggest you make the dough and do rising on your counter or in your oven just follow my original milk bread recipe HERE. And then just bake in your breadmaker.
- Different baking pan sizes bread machines have different shapes and sizes so thats another thing you will have to think about. Just for reference a pullman loaf pan is about 7.75 x 4.25 while my Zojirushi bread makers pan is 8.75 x 5. This recipe will bake well in both of these sizes but of course, the bread will come out less tall in wider pans. If you have a taller but smaller 1 lb bread machine, you need to 1/2 the dough in your final baking step. Refrigerate leftover dough
Heres an overview of the 3 cycles needed in making this bread in your machine:
Read Also: Where To Buy Chicken Pot Pie
About This Zojirushi Bb
If you love to bake your own bread at home then you must do it in style with the best breadmaker available! The tech-savvy Zojirushi is every chefs dream-come-true and every home bakers answer to baking fresh bread every day. This modern machine has been designed keeping in mind the needs and food choices of modern men and women who prefer to eat healthily and have less time to fix themselves a meal.
The Zojirushi BB-PDC20BA Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Breadmaker comes loaded with features like various menu options including multigrain, rapid whole wheat, salt-free, sugar-free, gluten-free, or vegan. It comes with double kneading blades to give you the softest dough for pizzas or rolls. The dual heaters at the bottom of the machine ensure uniform baking and browning. The rapid setting feature bakes your bread in just 2 hours and 25 minutes. You can monitor the baking cycle on the large LCD display and enjoy watching your loaf rise through the large viewing window. There are many other features that I have described in detail below.
Included Accessories: Measure It All
The Zojirushi comes with a liquid measuring cup, a set of dry measuring cups, and a dual measuring spoon. The spoon is marked S and L, for small and large, but in reality, it measures a teaspoon and a tablespoon. A mark halfway up in each spoon lets you estimate half-measures. The measuring cup doesnt have standard American cup measures. Instead, its in milliliters. While that might not be intuitive for normal cooking, the recipes in the included cookbook use metric measures. Given theyre free, the dry measuring cups were also much nicer than we expected. They measure ¼, , ½, and 1 cup.
Also Check: Adidas Ultra Boost Course A Pied
Bread Maker: Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus
The Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus makes a light 100% whole wheat loaf or a delightful white bread from start to finish, in a traditionally shaped, 2 pound, horizontal loaf! And that’s just the start of it. The Zojirushi does an outstanding job of developing gluten and you can use the dough cycle by itself if you want, then finish baking in your regular oven… make dough for crisp pizza crust, light dinner rolls, mouth-watering cinnamon rolls, hamburger or hoagie buns, artisan breads, sourdough, cakesthe possibilities are endless. Don’t want quite 2 lbs? The Zo gives you the freedom to make smaller 1.5 lb. loaves if you’d rather. Even makes fruit jam and meat loaf.
The Zojirushi bread maker has beefed-up pulleys and beltthe heaviest-duty drive system ever on a Zojirushi bread machine, for a long, trouble-free life. Unlike most bread machines, the Zo has plenty of power and durability for whole grain dough. Of course, it’s equally at home with white flour, or any blend you can imagine. Twin paddles provide superior kneading action so you get well-raised breads with great texture and the lid is highly domed to keep your bread from sticking to the lid if your recipe rises a little high, and has crust-control adjustability. Pan inside dimensions are 5″W x 8.75L x 4.75″D. Pan lining is BPA-free.
Quiet & Reliable
Even though it’s stronger than ever, this is also Zojirushi’s quietest breadmaker ever.
Easy to use
Programmed & Custom Cycles
Zojirushi Bread Maker
How Is Milk Bread Different From Other Breads
1. Milk bread is more moist, buttery, very slightly sweet and VERY light. It also uses a starter called Tangzhong which allows the bread to hold more moisture than the common bread recipe and thus you will have a more moist bread. You can get around this by using dry milk powder if you dont want to go through the extra step of making the starter.
2. In between steps of rising, you roll the dough resulting in a bread that has a feathery and stringy texture. Not at all crumbly as most sandwich breads are. So because of that, this bread works well as toasts or for PB& J sandwiches or egg salad sandwiches.
BTW, heres a quick video of how fluffy and amazing the bread is fresh out of the breadmaker!
You May Like: The Best Banana Bread Recipe Ever
Best Overall: Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Breadmaker
-
Heated top for even browning
-
Both fixed and customizable settings
-
Takes up a lot of counter space
Who else recommends it? NBC News, Forbes, and Good Housekeeping all picked the Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Breadmaker.
What do buyers say? 87% of 5,100+ Amazon reviewers rated this product 5 stars.
Anyone who bakes a lot of bread and takes home baking seriously will appreciate all the features packed into this Zojirushi bread maker, and its performance in Lab and home tests made it our best overall pick. This model makes rectangular 2-pound loaves and is loaded with custom settings so you can bake a variety of breads exactly the way you want.
You can choose a light, medium, or dark crust, and there are pre-programmed settings for basic and rapid white or whole wheat bread, gluten-free bread, sourdough starter, jam, cake, and homemade recipes. This machine has two kneading paddles to make sure the dough is completely kneaded with no bits of flour left unmixed and a 13-hour delay timer. A large window lets you check the progress of your bread as it bakes.
This is a high-end machine with a price to match, so it might not be the best option for casual bakers or novices who arent sure how much use theyll get out of a bread maker.
Price at time of publish: $378
The Spruce Eats / Tamara Staples
Performance: It Does Everything Well
This is an impressive bread machine. We started our testing with a basic recipe from the included cookbook and it came out exactly as expected. From there, we moved on to whole wheat bread using the wheat setting, and an herb bread using the European setting. Each of those emerged perfectly, with a nicely rounded top. We made jam and pizza dough, and were more than happy with the results. We attempted the pound cake recipe, but it came out a little dry.
The Zojirushi has a suggested order for adding ingredients, with water and other liquids added first and yeast added last. After making so many successful loaves of bread following those instructions, we decided to test what would happen if we added yeast the same time as water. We still got an acceptable loaf of bread, which gave us confidence to try even more interesting recipe variations.
We started our testing with a basic recipe from the included cookbook and it came out exactly as expected.
After a lot of baking, the only bread that wasnt great was a gluten-free loaf that had a concave top. Gluten-free bread can be finicky even when its baked in the oven, though, so we werent too concerned about flaws in appearance. With some tweaking and testing, were sure we could perfect that one that as well.
You May Like: Nothing Bundt Cakes Free Birthday Cake
Features: So Many Settings
The Zojirushi has 13 different programs including bread, jam, and dough. There are two rapid settings: one for white bread and one for wheat bread. The salt-free, sugar-free, and vegan settings adjust the baking process to accommodate those variables. While many users wont need special settings, theyre handy to have.
We found the control panel easy to use, save for one minor quibble. Since the LCD screen isnt backlit, it can be hard to read in dim light. While this might not be a problem in most well-lit kitchens, you wont want to put it in a dark corner. The setting numbers and descriptions are printed on the front of the lid for easy reference.
We found the control panel easy to use, save for one minor quibble. Since the LCD screen isnt backlit, it can be hard to read in dim light.
The machine beeps towards the end of the kneading process so you can add extra ingredients.
The rapid settings shave about an hour off of total baking time, so instead of a little over three hours, the bread is complete in just over two . Thats not as quick as some machines, but weve found that super-quick bread can be disappointing.
If you want to bake bread but have to step away from the kitchen, a delayed start feature lets you add your ingredients and then schedule a time for the bread to be finished. Since this machine has a clock, we were able to set it for an actual time rather than doing the math to figure out how many hours of a delay we needed.
The Spruce Eats / Donna Currie
Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Breadmaker Is The Winner
We independently research, test, review, and recommend the bestproductslearn more about our process. If you buy something through our links, we may earn a commission.
The Spruce Eats / Tamara Staples
After extensive testing, the Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Breadmaker is our overall winner for its consistent results and the extra features that are jam-packed in this model. If you’re looking for a budget pick, you can’t go wrong with the Oster ExpressBake 2-Pound Bread Maker, which is simple to use and produces above-average results.
Theres no doubt that homemade bread is delicious, but not everyone has the time or desire to mix, knead, and babysit a ball of dough while it rises. The entire process can take multiple hours, which isn’t convenient or practical for many people. Enter: the modern bread machine.
Bread machines today are loaded with features and come in all shapes and sizes, so we took the most popular models to our Lab. There we ran them through their cycles, making banana bread, whole wheat bread, and gluten-free bread. Then we evaluated each one on ease of use, performance, versatility, cleaning, and overall value. Additionally, our experienced reviewers tested a few top options out in their home kitchens for more extensive testing insights.
Here are the best bread machines according to hours of bread-making tests.
Don’t Miss: How Do You Make Pie Crust From Scratch