Panasonic SD-RD250 Bread Maker

I absolutely love this machine. I have had it for many years with no problems whatsoever (.....other than that one time I forgot to put water in - user error!) I love having the raisin/nut dispenser, I use it often and pile it high with seeds to add to my dough. The other reviewer seemed put out by not having a yeast dispenser.... Umm I think that is why they invented bread machine yeast? With this machine I just add all the dough ingredients at the beginning, including some seeds in the dispenser (<5 minutes work), walk away, and then come back when it is done - et voila! Freshly baked bread. I also enjoy the timer function, I set it to finish when I wake up - take it out of the machine, then go have a shower and get ready and by this time the bread is cool enough to slice and I have fresh bread for my sandwiches. The beauty of having a bread maker is controlling what goes into your bread, no nasties, and still being able to have fresh bread without too much effort. The recipe booklet that comes with the machine is pretty good too, giving handy hints on how to use it and quite a good range of recipes (including gluten free) that you can then modify to your heart's content.

Why are the machines made for the US made more inferior to the ones made in EVERY OTHER COUNTRY Panasonic sells their Bread Machines. The ones made for the US have either a Yeast Dispenser OR Automatic Raisin and Nut Dispenser. In other countries you can get a machine that has a Yeast Dispenser, Automatic Raisin and Nut Dispenser, and a Jam making option. We have the most out of date model Panasonic makes. WHY?

I love this machine and use it about twice a week. I have never had a loaf go wrong and it is very very easy to use. I never buy bread anymore (except doughnuts occaisionally!). You can have a simple, white loaf in 2 hours (including prep time). Alternatively, on a preceding evening, you could prepare the ingredients for the same or for something much more complicated, calculate when you wish the bread to be ready for breakfast -- then you will wake up the next morning to a house smelling of freshly baked bread, which is ready for you to eat. Awesome! I'm English and moved to Germany 18 months ago. Whilst the bread here is okay, I personally prefer something lighter and doughy-er, at least occaisionally. A simple 1 quid white baguette is impossible to find here. In a good supermarket here, in their bakery, you can buy something called a French baguette (although it is rather shorter and fatter than a proper baguette), but it'll set you back 2-3 Euro and quite often I find it quite hard and sometimes even a bit stale. So, the idea for a breadmaker came to mind -- especially because I have tried many times in the past to make bread in the conventional fashion, but with little success. I studied yeast when I was at university, and so know about the temperatures they like to live at, sugar, salt etc, and to use good flour, but attempts to keep my small kitchen warm and wait for hours of prooving have always ended up with rather heavy, albeit still edible bread. I bought the SD255 from Amazon.co.uk and had it shipped to Germany without issue. I've had this machine a couple of months now and the novelty certainly has not worn off. To start with, I was exceptionally careful and followed the accompanying recipe book to the letter. The machine also comes with a plastic measuring jug and plastic measuring spoon, which are very useful. However, the bread still comes out really well despite that I have become somewhat more slack with my accuracy. I've also been pretty inventive and have thown in chopped garlic, sundried tomatoes, onion, a whole yellow pepper, tomatoes, etc, etc. I was also really careful with the type of flour I bought, but now I just buy any type of flour and it always works. I've not tried really cheap flour yet though. I've also combined recipes with similar success. It really is idiot-proof. The list of baking modes are: basic; whole wheat; rye; french; italian; sandwich; gluten free; pizza; bake only. There are over 60 recipes for bread provided in the recipe book. You can make 3 different sizes of loaf and can vary the colour of the crust according to your taste. There are also recipes for making dough only e.g. pizza dough, which you would then cook in a normal oven. And also cake recipes. I still have lots more to explore!! :-)

After reading every review I could lay my eyes on for every bread machine available I decided to go for this one. I was a little worried that it would be a five minute wonder, a bit like a sandwich toaster, seems like a good idea at the time but when the times come to clean it, not only is it difficult it's also a bit of a pain. This bread maker is absolutely brilliant! It makes bread, that's what it does, the best tasting bread I have had in many years. It is simple to use, the instructions are clear and concise and the recipes are spot on. Loading the ingredients takes 5 minutes, close the lid and switch it on, choose your loaf and amazingly 4 hours later you have baked your own bread. How easy is that! Some tips for those are new to bread making: Follow the instructions precisely, especially for the ingredients, don't be tempted to add `just a little more' of this or that, if you do your bread may fail. Buy accurate digital scales that weigh liquid, although Panasonic include a measuring cup it is far more accurate to weigh the water. 1ml = 1gramme. Use luke warm water, have the butter or oil at room temperature, this cuts the resting time, you will notice when you first switch on the machine, it seems to do nothing for some time, don't panic the machine is making sure that all of the ingredients are at the same temperature before mixing. Do not be tempted to open the lid and have a peek, trust me, this machine works beautifully, don't worry about the mixing blade being loose on the shaft, it's supposed to be like that, when metal gets hot it expands, if the blade was a tight fit you would not be able to remove it for some time. In summary: If you are thinking about purchasing a bread machine, this one will not disappoint you; I know it's more expensive than some of the others out there but in my view it's the best. The ingredients are simple; you do not need to add milk powder or any other additives, just natural stuff. It is quiet in operation, a breeze to use, the build quality is very good, the bread pan is a thick robust cast metal which is very easy to get in and out, the main thing for me is the cleaning, it's so easy, it takes no more than a wipe out with a damp cloth, fantastic! Buy it and you will never go back to shop bought bread again, except perhaps for "Tiger bread" yummy!

We bought this from Amazon because our local bakers closed and we cannot get "home-baked" bread locally any more. Amazon delivered it promptly and it was easy to assemble, although it is quite tall when it stands on the worktop, particularly if you are short like me. There was a note inside saying that Canadian and American strong flour worked best so we bought a bag of Canadian red wheat flower from Waitrose and a small bag of Allison breadmakers yeast.We decided to test it out using the Rapid Bake option first. My husband made it as he is very keen on fresh bread. The instructions were straightforward and we chose the Rapid Bake (2 hour option) for our first trial and a Med sized loaf (the smallest option) and light crust option. The display is easy to follow although I had to stand on tip toes to read it. We put in the ingredients and left it to bake. It took around 2 hours. The finished product had a very pale slight soggy top although the sides and bottom were nicely crispy but we can probably fix that by changing the crust setting. I suggest selecting the dark crust option if you chose the Rapid Bake setting. The texture was fine and it was well risen. My only real criticism is of the handle on the basket in which the bread is baked. For some reason this has not been designed to lay flat against its rim so when you remove it from the machine and tip the bread out, the handle falls forward and gets in the way. As the bread is very hot this makes it a bit tricky to handle. It would surely be easy to redesign the handle to lay flat against the sides of the basket when folded down. The height of the machine also meant that being short, I had to stand on tip toes to peer at the control panel when it stood on the counter. Overall Highly recommended.

Well, you can tell you are middle-aged when you consider a breadmaker to be life-changing... I bought this model because I primarily eat wholemeal bread and the reviews said its good for that. It is indeed very good for wholemeal. The recipes in the book are simple and minimal with respect to ingredients. We've seen a friend's breadmaker recipe book and it had weird recipes with milk powder etc in, even for the simple white loaves. The Panasonic bread recipes are based on: yeast, flour, sugar, water, oil/butter I don't use salt at all (the reason I bought a breadmaker was to eliminate salt from my bread). It takes a week or so to get used to bread without salt, but then it is more delicious I think. Despite what the instructions and conventional baking wisdom suggest, salt seems to make no difference to the results of baking with this breadmaker, so I suggest you take the chance to try cutting down. A quarter to a half a teaspoon of low sodium salt works ok and makes the bread more acceptable to those used to salt. This small a quantity doesn't give that nasty aftertaste that low sodium salts have. Sometimes I replace sugar with an equivalent amount of grape molasses. Olive oil and sunflower oil work well. The breadmaker copes with these variations well. I use the seed dispenser about 10% of the time. Adding seeds greatly increases the cost of a loaf, so after the honeymoon period I stopped adding them. Recently I've gone back to adding sunflower and pumpkin seeds (cheaper seeds). Some flours are better than others, and often the ones you think will be better (like organic corn-fed free-range fair-trade sustainably-sourced biodegradable hand-picked water-milled slow-grown low-carbon cadmium-free petrol-electric-hybrid dolphin-friendy flours) don't give as good results as your bog-standard wholemeal (waitrose organic stoneground wholemeal happens to be the best I've found). So try shopping around and compare results. White flour seems to be less variable and they all seem to work about the same. The breadmaker has some good other settings: Italian makes a nice ciabatta type white bread. French makes a crustier crust with lighter inside. The french setting can be used with wholemeal recipes and with larger quantities that the manual suggests. Pizza dough is really easy and now we make our own pizzas regularly - very easy and once you've started making your own you'll be a convert. Our tomato sauce recipe for 2 pizzas: 1 can chopped tomatoes, 1 tablespoon tomato puree, 1 teaspoon grape molasses(or sugar). Simmer for a long time over a low heat until its all smooth and mushy. We've found less is more where cheese is concerned. Keep it minimal and let the taste of the bread and sauce come through. I make a loaf every other day now (we ate less bread before). The kids love it for toast and sandwiches. No sign of any wear and tear or aging. I think a normal loaf costs me about 60p or so to make. I think thebreadmaker has paid for itself already. The shape of this breadmaker is good, its quite tall but has a smaller footprint on the worktop that a lot of other models. Hope you find this useful.

I bought this breadmaker recently to replace a Breville "Anthony Worral Thompson" model which had served me well for several years of regular use feeding a family of five. I bought the Panasonic SD255 on the basis that every site I viewed seemed to rate it very highly. I've now made several loaves with it using the "basic", "sandwich", "French" and "pizza dough" styles and I now appreciate why this machine is so highly regarded. On the evidence so far it produces bread of a consistently high quality. I am particularly impressed with how crusty the loaves are, so much so that I now usually use the "light" setting as anything higher is too much for my particular taste. Because the bread pan is slimmer and taller than I'm used to, I've decided to make smaller loaves but bake more often. (As an aside, I recommend adding a ground 500mg vitamin C tablet to the ingredients to help the loaf to rise. It helps compensate for poor quality bread flour and produces a more open, less dense texture.) The controls on the front of the machine are very easy to use. At first sight I thought the programming options were a little restrictive, but in reality you've really got everything you need for everyday bread. If you're looking for more complicated procedures you should probably be baking by hand anyway! The cooking programmes for the Panasonic are much longer than I've been used to: up to 6 hours for a French-style loaf. A lot of this time seems to be taken up at the start of the programme when nothing at all seems to be happening. I assume that there is some temperature equalization going on before mixing starts which demonstrates the depth of care taken over the design of the appliance. There is a "rapid" baking option which I have not tried but which takes only 2 hours if you're in a hurry. The fruit/seed/nut dispenser has taken a little getting used to from my previous machine, insofar as you have to select it as an option before you start. It's also only available with the "basic" and "whole wheat" recipes, but I wouldn't consider this in any way a limitation. On the plus side it is removable which means you can easily keep it clean. The interior of the breadmaker is easy to keep clean as well. One amazingly simple but really useful design feature that I discovered by accident is that there are small holes in the bottom around the agitator housing which make it very easy to sweep small fragments (loose sesame seeds in my case) out of the machine. In conclusion, would I recommend this breadmaker? Absolutely, and without reservation. Happy baking!