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. 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. 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