The Bread Machine Book: 75 Unforgettable, Unfussy Recipes for Every Baker [A Baking Cookbook]

by Lukas Volger

Overview

A modern, everything-you-need-to-know guide to baking perfect bread with a bread machine at home, with 75 recipes.

In The Bread Machine Book, veteran cookbook author Lukas Volger offers a thorough guide to the versatile bread machine. You'll learn how to buy one, use one, and utilize different ingredients and techniques to make your creations sing. The 75 recipes can be made in any bread machine you have at home, including:

• Buttery Brioche
• Honey-Barley Milk Bread
• Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Swirl Bread
• Date & Pecan Sourdough Loaf
• Ranch Rolls
• Matcha Ricotta Tea Cake

Each recipe contains a "faster" and a "slower" method: The fast utilizes the machine’s presets (just throw everything into your bread machine and let it work its magic), while the slower isolates the kneading and the baking functions to create bread with more developed flavor and better structure for not much extra work.

With comprehensive but easy-to-digest tips for success—including measuring methods, temperature targets, machine and visual cues to look for, and opportunities for hijacking your bread machine to knead and proof dough to be baked in your oven—this is the only book you need to bring easy, fail-proof loaves to the table every day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593835432
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	03/04/2025
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lukas Volger is a cookbook author, recipe developer, and entrepreneur in the food space. He’s written five previous cookbooks, including Bowl and Start Simple, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Bon Appétit, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Previously he co-created the award-winning queer food journal Jarry and the Brooklyn-based line of premium veggie burgers Made by Lukas. He lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt

This Old Thing?

I think I was nine or ten years old when my family got a bread machine. This was the early ’90s, and at the time they were a signifier of modernity, easy domestic prowess, and middleclass suburban comfort, steadily appearing in the kitchens of many of my mom’s friends. But I cared little about what they represented. Instead, I was enamored of the squishy, doughy loaves that emerged from them.

My brother and I would slather our slices with Country Crock margarine while they were still emanating steam, and then we’d cram them into our mouths, compressing a whole piece of bread into a single, Play-Doh–like ball. We thought it was the most ideal texture imaginable: gummy, gooey, good. All the loaves I made at that time came from packaged bread mixes, but it was still such a marvel. Homemade bread by the press of a button? A button that I pressed? Incredible!

My first bread machine affair didn’t last all that long, though. A year or so later, its mixing paddle got baked into a loaf and was accidentally tossed into the garbage with a stale heel, a familiar fate for fellow (and former) bread machine owners. Soon enough, the appliance seemed like a passing fad anyway.

But I can mark that period as an awakening, and the bread machine as a gateway to a lifelong passion. In a few years, I’d be working summers at Stone Mill Bread Company in Boise, Idaho, where in addition to tending the cash register and bagging sticky cinnamon-swirl bread, I was scooping flour from 32-gallon trash cans set on dollies, reaching all the way to my armpits into the funky depths of a bucket of sourdough starter to feed and mix it by hand, and portioning out dough with a bench scraper. I was learning, hands-on, about the levers of time, temperature, and yeast that miraculously transform wet flour into delicious bread.

I went on to cook in restaurant kitchens while attending college in New York, which is where I continue to live, and ultimately built a career as a cookbook author. And while my focus eventually shifted from baking to vegetablecentric savory cooking, my sourdough starter was almost always bubbling away in my fridge. From my Brooklyn studio apartment, I’d go through long stretches of turning out tangy, crusty, Tartine-style loaves every few days, giving them away to anyone who’d take them. New York City is a bread lover’s paradise—with excellent bakeries scattered liberally across the five boroughs—but the unique satisfaction of tearing into a fresh, homemade loaf has never once lost its grip on me.

So, when the opportunity came up several years ago to test out a half-dozen bread machines for a freelance project, I was skeptical. I’d long outgrown that retro appliance, and cultivated an appreciation for high-hydration sourdough country loaves with wide-open crumbs and thick, crackly crusts. I mean, I had a bread practice. What on earth did I need this machine for?

A lot, I soon found out. While bread machines aren’t perfect (what appliance is?), I discovered that they really excel at mixing, kneading, and proofing dough. Doing these tasks by hand can be a pleasure, sure, but it’s equally pleasurable to have the mess contained, the dough proofed to perfection, and for the whole process to require little to no attention or intervention.

Nowadays, I’ve got the toasty aroma of my 100% whole wheat loaf wafting from the kitchen at least twice a week. Homemade hamburger buns are a pretty reasonable thing to whip up on short notice to bring to a friend’s BBQ.

And I’ve discovered the thrill of homemade bagels on a lazy Saturday—why had I denied myself for so long? Sure, the appliance has some shortcomings (how about a paddleshaped gash in the bottom of your bread, or the comically tall, R2-D2–shaped loaves that some models yield?), but as you’ll discover in the pages that follow, these quirks are easy to work with or overcome.

And while I was busy revisiting the bread machine, coming to regard it not as a replacement for a breadmaking practice but as a tool for enhancing and streamlining it, I learned that scores of bakers across the world had never lost any affection for theirs. They capitalized on its best features right away. Or they embraced the machine to adapt to lifestyle changes interfering with their breadmaking routines, such as when kneading and handling dough became difficult due to injuries or conditions that limited their mobility in the kitchen.

Others got into homemade bread during the pandemic stay-athome orders, when sourdough starter became a staple of many home kitchens. With the flexibility to attend to the finicky schedule of homemade sourdough, these cooks came to appreciate the delicious ROI on home-baked bread. But with post-pandemic life reasserting its pre-pandemic demands, the bread machine presented itself as a helpful compromise—a way to keep fresh bread on hand without as much oversight.

And in 2023, Christina Morales of the New York Times reported that a new generation was taking to bread machines to cut down on grocery costs during inflation. Snagging inexpensive secondhand models online or at Goodwill stores, home cooks and TikTok influencers were using them to make better bread with ingredients of their choosing, at less than half the cost of what grocery stores were charging for the commercially made stuff. Morales’s article noted a 20 percent surge in sales for bread machines that year.

So obviously I’ve only been catching up to the collective mood.

If you own any other bread books, you may have noticed that bread can inspire quite a passion for science and technique. There’s a lot to know. But for me, an overload of detail can be overwhelming, so I’ve tried not to approach this book that way. It isn’t written from the scientific or overly exacting point of view that distinguishes many bread cookbooks. As I see it, the bread machine was designed to make life easier, and my goal is to share recipes that channel its inherent ease.

In the next chapter I take more of a deep dive into the process, with helpful guidelines and tips to lead you on your journey. But know that this book is chiefly a celebration of, and perhaps an invitation to reconsider, a uniquely useful kitchen appliance, one that probably should never have gone out of fashion. My passion for cooking and baking started with a bread machine, and with this, I catalog a full-circle moment, taking me back to where it began.