Breadmakers are rather strange things. They’re surprisingly big kitchen appliances with only one use: they bake bread. Now, baking bread isn’t really that hard, but breadmakers claim to make it so super-easy that you can eat freshly-baked bread every day for the rest of your life. Much like those machines that make you orange juice every day from fresh oranges, however, the necessity of this is debatable.

To use a breadmaker, all you need to do is add the ingredients of bread (flour, milk, yeast and so on) and turn it on – you can even get special ‘bread mix’ to use if fresh ingredients are too much trouble for you. The machine will make dough from your ingredients and then bake it into a loaf of bread. The bread typically tastes quite good, but won’t last very long because of the lack of preservatives.

Where breadmakers really get interesting is not when they are making normal, store-style bread, but when you decide to get creative with them. Because they make bread so quickly, they make it much more convenient to experiment with strange ingredients that might just turn out great. You can make bread with your favourite cheese in it, for example, or chocolate, or some kind of herbs and spices that you like. There are many websites on the Internet devoted entirely to sharing interesting breadmaker recipes, and many new kinds of bread have been discovered through this experimentation that would never have been found otherwise.

Basically, if you just want bread, you’re probably better off buying it from a shop. If you want unusual, customised experiments in bread, however, then breadmakers aren’t very expensive, and getting one could be a good choice for you. The only thing to worry about, really, is where on earth to put the bulky things.