About selecting a kneading machine and electric oven

satimis,

Your question is rather open ended but I will try to point you in a good direction.

First the oven. If you can afford a premium quality electric oven  that has both convection (fan on) and conventional (fan off) capability, that would be my first preference. Some ovens can not be run with the fan off and that is a problem.

Next check to see how hot it will get. Some will get to 550F which is good. My oven only goes to 500F and I wish it was higher.

There are some premium ovens that have a steam feature. This is a great thing to have available but again it will be more expensive. The price range for a free standing stove with oven runs from $450 to several thousand dollars. At a minimum, any standard home oven should serve you well for general baking/roasting.

A dough kneading or mixer is a specialized home appliance. You don't need one strictly speaking for bread although many people here have stand mixers. Without knowing a little about baking and what your needs are, I'd say use your hands on a plastic scraper in a wide metal bowl for now and decide later. Hope this helps some.

Eric

I have nothing to add to that. As for the kneading machine I shopped and researched until I was blue in the face to make a decision about that. What I ended up with was a repair job on my 20 year old Kitchen Aid mixer for making cookies, pies and the like and this bread machine. http://www.amazon.com/Emerilware-T-Fal-3-PoundBread-Baguette-Maker/dp/B001BQZDA4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320946864&sr=8-1

It is an Emerilware by T-Fal Emerilware 3-PoundBread &
Baguette Maker, it ranges in price from between $125.00 to $150.00 depending on where you get it....I use it to knead and rise my bread dough. I have never cooked in it and I never will but as a kneading machine it is wonderful. I have had it for about 2 years now and I have had to replace the bread pan because the gaskets around the mixing blades wore out and the blades kept falling out. That cost me about $30.00 but other than that I have no complaints and I would make the purchase all over again.

Now if I didn't have the old Kitchen Aid mixer to repair would I buy one of those expensive mixers made for kneading bread? No, because I can have a bread machine to make my bread in and a mixer that is excellent for making cakes and other pastries....and I can have both brand new for less than the cost of one of one of those mixers that is mainly built for making bread.

For bread I need to use the oven that's already in my kitchen; I can't afford a new one. I wish I was in a position to buy the "best" oven for baking bread  ...but my household budget says it will never happen:-) Fortunately any old kitchen oven works just fine for baking bread, so my limited budget isn't really an issue.

For bread you basically have only two choices:

• A bread machine
• Your kitchen oven (perhaps supplemented by a kneading mixer)

Bread machines get the job done (and may be a good place to start), but often users eventually find themselves frustrated by the lack of flexibility. So many folks eventually move to a "half-way" solution, using the bread machine's "dough" cycle to mix and knead, but then removing the dough and shaping it yourself and baking it in your oven.

There are several threads here on TFL about which mixers work well  ...with a wide variety of comments. One common suggestion is that in a typical situation (i.e. no special requirements) for the kinds of higher hydration doughs used nowadays, the best mixer is no mixer - do it by hand. Whether you can use a stand mixer to knead bread dough is debatable: some will say it works just fine, others will report huge problems with machine damage and warranty refusals. A mixer that will definitely do a good job of mixing dough all the time, if bought new, may cost $800-$1200! That's a high enough amount to make most folks think "do I really need this?"

I would point out that the preference for electric ovens is not just 'a preference'.  It's because gas oven vents let steam out much quicker than electric, and many artisan breads require a pretty good jolt of steam if you want to be able to perfect the crust.  That said, we do have a gas oven and it works reasonably well, although for bread, I prefer the electric oven that we had in the house that we lived in before the current one... it made better crusts and kept the steam in better.

Boy would I like to have an oven with steam injection capabilities... that'd be awesome!  It's useful for other than bread too ...Julia Child recommends using steam when baking water fowl, noting that the steam melts the excess fat out of the bird.  Shut the steam of towards the end in order to brown up the skin and voila!  Goose for dinner!

Brian

At this point your money would be better spent on a good scale and a good thermometer.

Jim

satimis,

OK now we have something to go on. Cuisinart has a nice counter top brick oven that has heat tiles all around like a hearth oven that have heard good things about. Not sure if they have a 220 model but probably yes. You can find them on Amazon in the US for under $100. Here is the link. It would be good for all but large breads.

Eric