Making bread by hand is hard, are breadmakers better?

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There's no finer pleasure than starting the day with a slice of hot, fresh bread dripping in salted butter. Poets have waxed on about the joys of transforming so few ingredients into such a beautiful foodstuff for millennia. But unless life has been very good to you, it's probably not often you wake up to freshly-made bread wafting from your kitchen.



Are breadmakers the answer to this, the most first-world of first-world problems? And are they able to match or outdo the stuff I can make by hand? French Bread by hand It was only when we bought our home that I decided that making bread was a skill I had to learn lest I not feel like a Proper Adult. I scoured YouTube for a tutorial and stumbled across this clip by star baker Richard Bertinet. I've written before about how comforting and relaxing this video is, and it's a balm for the soul when you're having a rough day.

Bertinet made this look so easy that anyone could achieve similarly beautiful results. Alas, I could not. Mercifully, this was in the heyday of Twitter when celebrities were all around and happy to talk to fans.

So, I asked Bertinet himself and got the necessary advice to remedy my woes — I wasn't kneading the dough confidently, or for as long enough as I needed to make it work. After that, I was churn.