It’s Time to Bring Bread Machines Back
Photo by edvvc/Creative Commons
It’s the week before Christmas in 2006. My mom is gazing into a whirring, R2D2 lookalike machine on the counter. The kitchen smells like rosemary, a scent that’s wafting generously from the machine as a blob of dough slowly rises inside. Her bread machine, already old at that point and seemingly unbreakable, helps her make countless loaves of rosemary bread, which she will then distribute to our neighbors as a gesture of holiday-induced goodwill.
That iconic scent of freshly baked rosemary bread permeates my memories of the holidays; to this day, I only really cook with rosemary in December. But my mom’s bread-baking wasn’t limited to Christmastime; during the rest of the year, she would make fluffy white bread and yellow-tinged egg bread, whole wheat sandwich bread and braided challah-like loaves we ate plainly buttered so as not to obscure the natural flavor.
She made it all with that machine, the bread machine, an appliance that for decades fell by the wayside. Bread machines rose to popularity in American homes in the 1990s, but they weren’t a long-lived success. Before long, seeing a bread machine in someone’s house was a rare occurrence; my mom may have been one of the few who kept using their bread machines consistently throughout the 2000s. In a 2017 article for TASTE, Tatiana Bautista argued that a widespread fear of carbs during the late ‘90s and early ‘00s led to the bread machine’s demise. The gluten-free movement probably didn’t help either.
But things are changing, and bread machines are becoming relevant once again. During the early lockdown days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many took up bread baking, a notoriously time-consuming project. What else did we have to do besides sit in our houses all day? Our Instagram feeds were suddenly populated with loaves upon loaves of homemade sourdough. People wanted to avoid the grocery store as much as possible, and baking bread at home meant that they had to go food shopping less frequently.