Bought it to save on sandwich bread, was 53 from best buy, originally 150 their site said. Now I just make bread every day. Then I started putting Vegemite on it and am addicted to that. Also Vegemite plus avocado toast is insanely good and cheap for the calories. Also good nutritional value.
I can speed make it in the morning with good preparation hacks. I use mason jars with all the dry ingredients ready to go in a drawer, and I use a digital scale to make adding flour fast and accurate.
My favourite place to buy small kitchen appliances is the thrift store. People love to buy kitchen gadgets but they don't love to use them, so you can get nearly-new appliances for very little.
Do thrift stores still have good deals. I heard you could buy a bread maker there for like 8 bucks. But that was years ago. From what I heard they are all almost as expensive as Walmart or just out of stock for things like kitchen gadgets.
Chain thrift stores aren't anywhere near what they used to be. Goodwill's been crap for awhile, but now I'm even noticing Salvation Army's being pretty expensive. The best places to go are always the hole-in-the-wall local thrift stores that aren't part of some larger chain - that's where you can find great deals. Unfortunately, those also tend to be small places with low selection, so I rarely go thrift shopping for a specific thing, since I'm not likely to find exactly what I'm looking for on any given trip. The the kinds of people who are able to find a bread maker for $8 are the ones who frequent a bunch of local thrift stores just for fun, buying stuff they want as they happen to find it.
I've been curious about those machines. I see them all the time in my local thrift stores. I normally just make bread in my Dutch oven but I don't always have the time or energy to dedicate to it. Are any brands better than others?
I bought a random one at the thrift store a few months ago, it's some no name brand. My only requirement was finding one that didn't have any scratches on the Teflon nonstick coating on the pan.
It has been amazing, it takes literally 5mins to measure and throw the ingredients in there and push start. Took a little while to fine tune the recipe. It's nothing like baking bread but I completely stopped buying bread after getting the machine. Now I can still bake when ever i want, but its an easy way to make sure I always have bread around.
I read on r/BreadMachines that the brand really doesn't matter, just buy one for 20usd or less and get started. So far it seems to be true for me.