If you aren’t getting good bread from your bread machine, you’re definitely doing something wrong. Bread machines are pretty simple and peaked in the 90s for the most part. I have one of the cheapest ones on the market from the 90s and the bread that comes out of my kitchen blows away everything at the grocery store for a fraction of the price. I make sandwich breads, pizza dough, English muffin dough, pretty much anything and it’s all good.

I think the big thing people get wrong is not weighing their ingredients. You just can’t make consistently good bread with volumetric measurements. The hydration of the dough (ratio of flour and water) is very important and a cup of flour can vary a lot.

There’s also a ton of very low quality recipes out there. Even the book that came with my bread maker is pretty terrible. If you don’t want to get in to the science of it, just stick to King Arthur recipes. There’s a ton of bread maker specific ones and they often have modifications for bread makers in the other recipes.

Ingredients matter a lot as well. Besides the fact that higher quality ingredients produce higher quality food, flour isn’t interchangeable. So if you’re using regular cheap all purpose flour instead of bread flour, the amount of water it absorbs is different and you’ll get bad results. You can get decent enough white bread from cheap AP flour but you need a lot less water. It will be basically wonder bread though, nothing mind blowing.

In terms of effort, I guess this is subjective. But I just started some whole wheat bread and it took about 5 minutes to weigh the water, salt, yeast, whole wheat flour, bread flour, and gluten. The cycle takes a few hours and my baby will have bread for lunch for the rest of the week. And it doesn’t contain any sugar or brominated flour like every whole wheat bread at the grocery store. Also with a decent loaf of bread is pushing 8-9 dollars at the store, this saves a lot of money. This loaf cost less than a dollar even using high quality flour.

Why would you presume that? Maybe they’re suffering and trying to raise awareness.

Anecdotal but all of the Catholics I know have either converted to the episcopal church or they just never go to mass or talk about it but say they’re catholic so grandma doesn’t get sad. You go to mass, and there are no young people whatsoever. I don’t have hard data to back this up but it seems like the Catholic Church in the US could just collapse before a significant schism reaches us.

And the amazon result is some unknown Chinese brand with 5,000 suspicious 5 star reviews

We’ve had a good balance the past couple days. I like both.