Oster Expressbake Breadmaker, 2-lb. Loaf Capacity, 2 lb, White/Ivory

Bought: March 3, 2013 @ 59.99 Date of this Review: November 12, 2015 Status of this breadmaker: Showing its age but still chugging! I have been relocated by my company (together with my family) here in the US from Singapore. We moved to New Jersey around Nov, 2012 and we have been buying loaves of bread from our nearby supermarket daily @ $2.50 a pop 5 times a week. Over the couple of months we noticed that we are feeling a bit "down" thinking it was just us adjusting to the weather but we were also gaining weight every month. So, trying to be "healthy" we started reading the labels of each food we buy and noticed a LOOOOT of ingredients that looked like from a science fiction/medical drama series (see attached photo). So we thought of making our own bread from scratch but didn't want to spend a lot of time kneading and rising the dough everyday. Enter this bread machine and some research enabled us to save money and in turn saved our health. For the money saving part, we sourced the following ingredients: Walmart: Great Value Flour 25-Pound - $8 (37 servings) Great Value Powdered Milk 4-lbs - $16 (64 servings) Zulka Morena Pure Cane Sugar, 8 lbs - $5 (128 servings) Great Value: Vegetable Oil, 1 Gal - $5 (64 servings) Augason Farms Iodized Salt, 104 oz - $5 (623 servings) Amazon: Bob's Red Mill Gluten Flour Pack of 4 of 22-ounce each - $23 (83 servings) The Ready Store: SAF Premium Yeast 16oz - $7 (48 servings) Note: Per 1 serving denotes 1 loaf of 1.5 lb bread. So per serving of all combined ingredients above costs me $1.012! (Savings: $1.488). So in less than 2 months, I already made back the cost of the bread machine. So after that and 28 months later today - this breadmaker is still baking strong even after roughly 500 loaves of bread (20+/- loaves a month) with a total saving of around $700+. That said, we felt better after a couple of months and lost some weight. Even our dog likes our freshly baked bread - note that she NEVER EVER touched the ones we bought from the store. Not to mention the great sensation of smelling the loaves you bake - it's freshness! And a dab of butter on a freshly cut loaf lifts up your morale even more! The other best thing about making your bread at home - you can go beyond that simple loaf of bread! Add nuts, add eggs, add spices. Turn it into pumpernickel. Turn it into hoagies. Into fresh baguette. Into basically...anything! I bought the "The Artisan Bread Machine" here in Amazon and delved into more creations. We can now make anything the fancy bakeries out there can make WITHOUT the unspeakable ingredients. Pros: * Durable * Can make a variety of loaves with your desired setting * It takes only around 5 minutes to dump in the ingredients then it mixes and bakes * Never failed to make the perfect loaf (only if you put in the correct ingredients in the correct order) Cons: * As it ages (more than 2 years old now), the non-stick coating is fading but that's to be expected * It doesn't do laundry Bottomline: If this breaks - I'm buying it again and hopefully the same quality as before. Worth the money and ROI pays off quickly. Better health knowing you know what goes in your bread > Priceless! ---------------------------------------- Update: 2/1/2017 After almost 4 years - we have to let go of this beloved bread machine of ours. Not because it stopped working, but because we once again have to move to a country of different voltage and would deem impractical to bring this along. So almost after 4 years - it is still working and will hopefully find a new home (donated to the VVA). Definitely, if I ever found the same brand, we're buying this again. This is a final revision of this review - This bread machine has given us wonderful bread (and some bad ones - our fault) and wonderful memories. And thank you for the helpful comments that helped us and others. Hope this would help more people in the future.

Follow the Oster recipe. I did that. Twice. More or less. After reading people's experiences here and elsewhere, I added vital wheat gluten - 7 tsp. for 4-2/3 cups of 100% whole wheat flour. I also added 2 TBS oil because the Oster recipe was inexplicably missing it, though they had oil in their other bread recipes - I think it would have stuck to the pan in the mixing without it. And 1/4 cup of flax and sunflower seeds and oats. It looked dry during kneading, so I added 3 tsp of water, one at a time. The ball looked fine after that. Because my first loaf came out like a doorstop - it didn't rise even to the top of the pan - I followed other advice here and put the pan with the dough in the oven to rise - set the temp at 170 and left the door open. It rose just to the top of the pan. Then I baked it in the machine. Same result as the first loaf. Tastes good enough, but very dense - like I said, the black hole of bread. All my ingredients are fresh, and except for the above-noted changes, I followed the recipe exactly - same amount of flour, brown sugar, yeast, salt, water. Disaster. But I didn't buy this thing just to knead the dough, and then have to put the dough in a bread pan in a regular oven. So at the moment, I don't know what's going wrong. I don't think more gluten and yeast are going to help - more would probably hurt, actually. I used Whole Foods organic whole wheat flour - the recipe didn't specify a certain brand, and I doubt that could make much difference. What I want is a loaf much, much closer to the kind that, say, Dave's Killer Bread makes - whole grain, seeds and stuff, and pretty light and fluffy for whole grain bread. I'll try a few more loaves, and if they keep coming out this way, I'll be returning this thing as non-functioning. UPDATE: 4/6/16 Upgrading to 5 stars. If only because this thing walked itself off the kitchen counter, fell to the floor, the lid came off and skidded across the floor ... and I put it all back together, no plastic broke, and... IT STILL WORKS!!! Helps that the kitchen floor is wood, but still...I mean, that's worth 5 stars all by itself. OK, so that happened. My only quibble is the display - it doesn't light up and the overhead lighting has to be just right to be able to read it. Not that the timer matches what the manual says is supposed to be happening, but to me that's just another one of those irrelevancies, as you'll see if you keep reading. I've just about started to break even on making bread versus buying it. The loaves are getting better and that's because I've started using white whole wheat flour - still whole wheat, just the white variety of wheat instead of the more common red. Makes all the difference. OK, not all - I've had to increase the gluten (maybe a quarter-cup, and yes, I'm lucky gluten and my body understand each other) and yeast. The manual has a recipe that calls for 3 teaspoons of active dry yeast for 100% whole wheat bread but 5 teaspoons fast-rising yeast for Expressbake white bread. So I began using 5 teaspoons of fast-rising yeast in the normal bake 100% whole wheat. After all, fast-rising is the same as bread machine yeast, and this is a bread machine, is it not? Fast-rising needs only one rising, but normal bake has three, so fast-rising yeast + three rises = high-rise 100% whole wheat bread, right? Right. As in, beyond your wildest dreams. Of course, I look at instructions that say bread-making requires precise measurements and I think, "as if" (which is why I flunked algebra - twice - it's a lifestyle thing...) - "precise" means "just a suggestion." So each loaf is like a mystery to me - if it fails or succeeds, I don't know why. Kind of like life, huh? Full of wonder, right? I do things like, oh, set it for whole wheat, let knead for the first 5 minutes, turn it off, do it again, and again, then let it go through the program. I figure whole wheat kneads more needing - er, needs more kneading. Then when finishes its last rise, just before it begins baking, I take the dough out and pull out the kneading blade - the holes it leaves are too big. So I get results like, well, for a while I was getting loaves that rose up to the lid and stuck there - not conducive for browning. I wonder what measurement did that ... actually, I probably should say "measurement," maybe it's something to do with, like, algebra? Plus they were so big that I couldn't get to the handle. So I had to pull the handle up some by force, which took off part of the crust, then decided to just leave the thing in there and set it on bake. It would be nice if you could use my experience as an object lesson, but I have no clue what I did to make the bread do that, so I can't tell you what not to do. Except maybe to not look at measurements as "measurements." Good luck! UPDATE 4/7/16: The photo speaks for itself. Despite my best efforts, this little, much-abused machine turned out a stellar loaf of bread. Light, chewy crust...huge. UPDATE 11/1/16: Got tired of oversized loaves, and the bread tasted too yeasty, so cut back on the yeast to 3 tsp - and that worked. The crust browns nicely when it isn't squashed against the lid. One thing still bothers me: the cycles don't start and stop at the times given in the manual. Most important, the first kneading is supposed to last 5 minutes - it goes for 7 minutes, so that's OK,. But the second kneading is supposed to last 20 minutes - it doesn't; it lasts only 14 minutes. The 2 extra minutes in the first kneading doesn't make up for this shortened time. This is serious - bread depends on the kneading to make the best loaf. And my loaves are pretty dense, even for whole wheat with all kinds of added ingredients. So as I said above, I get the process going, then stop it in the middle of the second kneading and start all over again. Seems to work better. But really - Oster ought to check into this. It's been happening since Day One, and falling off the counter didn't change anything. After the whole wheat cycle is done baking, I still bake it on Bake (#12) for another 15-20 minutes - seems to need it. Otherwise, I'm happy with the machine, glad I have it, and it still warrants 5 stars. UPDATE 5/6/18: OK, don't ever do this: accidentally turn the bread machine off just as it's about to enter its final rise. I kind of brushed the button with my sleeve - no, really! - and it turned itself off. *&^^$$@*(!!! OK, look in the manual - like for power outage. The manual tells you what to do but you have to do it within 6 minutes of the outage: unplug the machine, then plug it back in and hold down the start button for 3 seconds and release, and the machine should start up where it left off. If only. Maybe it's because I turned the thing off - I should have accidentally flipped the circuit breaker. Anyway it didn't work. Now I'm having to let the dough rise in the oven - I warmed it up some, turned it off - no idea what temperature, and no idea what temp the bread machine uses. So I set it to 170, the lowest it can go, let it warm up to maybe 100, turned it off, opened the door - so it's rising nicely. Since I don't know how well it's rising - like, forming giant bubbles, rising too fast? - I can only guess and take it out when it gets to its usual machine rise height, then put it in the machine and use the Bake setting (#12). And see what happens. But really - there should be a way to set the machine to start at any step of the way - how complicated could that be to make? Maybe it's something that's available only on expensive machines?

good stuff

The machine is easy to use and offers a variety of bread types and other dough products. However, I would suggest searching out other recipes online. We have only tried whole wheat recipes so far, but the results varied quite a bit according to the recipe we used. As the comments suggest, you can experiment and add or subtract small amounts of ingredients in a particular recipe to get better results, but for the beginner, trying various recipes can be an easier entry into using the bread machine to its maximum. After a few attempts with mixed results, the recipe that I tried today (found online) produced a lighter, tastier whole wheat bread as compared to the ones in the user manual. Generally pleased with the simplicity of use and variety of bread products available on this machine. Also, clean-up is quick and easy.

Excelente equipo. Es importante seguir las instrucciones correctamente. También tienen que considerar a que altura sobre el nivel del mar está operando la panera, ya que de eso depende que quede bien el producto final. Las primeras piezas de pan, no quedaron bien, por lo que tuve que cambiar un poco las recetas ya que se tenia que aumentar o disminuir algún ingrediente. Pero después, todo fue muy fácil, y el resultado es asombroso. Excelentes Hogazas de Pan. Lo recomiendo ampliamente. Pero recuerden, hay que hacer pruebas al principio, pero una vez que quede un hogaza, apuntar bien la receta y volverla a hacer igual Sugiero comprar un libro de recetas, ya que en estos libros, viene bien explicado la diferencia de cocinar en ciudades que están al nivel del mar y las que están a mas de 1500 metros de altura sobre el nivel del mar (Como Mexico,D.F., Puebla, Toluca, etc). Si consideran este factor, el producto final sale perfecto

Je n'ai que de bons commentaires pour ma nouvelle machine à pain. J'ai fait plusieurs recettes et le pain est toujours parfait. La texture de la mie et de la croute sont toujours parfait. La mie est moelleuse et la croute croustillante sans être dure. L'appareil est très stable sur le comptoir et ne bouge pas. Le bac interne est facile à manipuler, facile à installer et à retirer quand le pain est prêt. Très bon achat, je suis très satisfaite.

Con levadura instantánea en buen estado, levanta bien la masa, excepto en el modo xpress de 1 hora total, ahí siento que no levanta tanto como en los otros modos, pero eso es de esperarse y de cualquier forma quedan muy decentes. Buena calidad, no hace mucho ruido ni se tambalea al batir. OJO: Si tienes niños, jugando aprietan el botón de inicio o apagado, se echó a perder el pan, xq no puedes reiniciar donde ibas, inicia de nuevo a batir y demás. Hemos probado pan de plátano, clásico, italiano, etc. todos han salido bien sin problemas. Pagué cerca de 100 USD ($1,920MXN) y compraría de nuevo, mis hijos piden pan diario desde que la tenemos. He escuchado quejas por la altura sobre el nivel del mar, pero en Guadalajara, funcionó sin problemas.