LekueSilicone Bread Maker, Model #, Brown

Lekue Bread baker/ recipe to amazonThis is a really fine product. I’m 84 years old and was having difficulty handling the weight of the Dutch oven that I used in making bread, particularly when it was 400 degrees, so I thought I would give the Lekue a try. Admittedly the booklet’s recipes aren’t too helpful. What I now use it for is making whole wheat Irish soda bread and it does a great job. My recipe is simple, and I mix it right in the cooker, so I don’t have any dirty bowls to wash. For what it is worth here is the recipe:Tools needed:1 teaspoon measure, 1 tablespoon measure, 2 cup mixing cup for the flour, bran, and buttermilk and an optional egg-use the cup for measuring the flour and bran first, plastic scraper for mixing, a fork for whipping the egg, and the Lekue cooker. Turn on your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 to 205 Celsius, so it has time to heat.Dry ingredients (put the ingredients directly into the Lekue cooker):2 ½ cups of whole wheat flour1 cup of bran--½ cup of wheat or oat bran and ½ cup of ground flax or chia seeds or a mix of the two. Remember to use your mixing cup for measuring the flour and bran before you use it for the wet ingredients.1 teaspoon of salt¾ teaspoon of baking soda-in Ireland it’s called bread soda-tip from the Irish housewives; baking soda and baking powder tend to form small clumps which will ruin your day if you bite into a lump at breakfast, so put the baking soda and baking powder it in the palm of your hand and press it with the back of a spoon to break up any clumps- then dump it in the Lekue baker2 teaspoons of baking powder (why I don’t know, but it works, i.e. the bread rises)Mix the dry ingredients well with your plastic or silicon scraper/spoon. Make certain they are very well blended.Wet ingredients:Crack one egg into your 2 cup measuring cup and whisk with a fork. I’m not certain if an egg is necessary, but I think it makes the bread hold together betterAdd 8 to 12 ounces of buttermilk start out with 8 ounces (you can use dried buttermilk--one brand is Soco Cultured Buttermilk--which is ok, and if you use dried buttermilk mix it with the dry ingredients, but I think liquid makes a somewhat better bread). Start out with 8 ounces of buttermilk or water if you used dried buttermilk and mix it with the egg.Using your tablespoon add 2 tablespoon of cooking oil to your buttermilk and egg mix and stir it up.Using the same tablespoon you used for the oil add 2 or 3 tablespoons of honey—by using the same tablespoon you used for oil with no cleaning the honey will roll right out with no sticking and no mess.ProcedureMix all the liquids well, make a hole in the center of your dry ingredients and pour the liquids in. Here I depart from the Irish ladies. They mix with their hands, and I have done so, but it is a very wet dough and your hands will soon be covered, so now I just mix with the spoon. You will undoubtedly need more liquid to get it all mixed together, so just keep adding liquid and stirring until you don’t have any more dry ingredients to mix. Shape the mix into a loaf shape crosswise in the Lekue baker. Cut or poke a line down the center of the loaf, so the bread can expand. I just use the fork I used to beat the egg. Irish ladies use a knife to cut a quite deep cross in the bread to let the Fairies out, or to protect the bread against the Devil, or maybe to just make certain the bread is cooked through. Close the top of the Lekue cooker and put the bread in the oven. Bake for 45 minutes, then open the top of the Lekue and cook for another 15 minutes. Take it out of the oven and let it cool for an hour or so. Use a rack, so air can circulate below. No rack--tip from the Irish ladies—two upside down forks work as well as a rack. Tip from me—I cool it on a turned off burner on the stove—works fine.This is a very good bread. 100% whole grain with added fiber and minimal cleanup. I only wash the Lekue cooker after, give or take, a dozen loaves. Since I am both the baker and the dishwashing machine clean up is important, and the cooker does a great job of being both the mixing bowl and cooking the bread.

I'm learning to make sourdough bread with a natural yeast starter. It's quite expensive to buy the Lodge or Ceramic bakeware needed to get the crispy crust sourdough is known for, and I wasn't sure I could keep even my yeast alive let alone create a loaf of bread with it. I bought two Lekue bread makers. They have worked well and saved me a lot of money. After some experimentation, I have been able to make delicious and crusty sourdough bread. I'm grateful for the low price while experimenting in this new type of bread making, and I don't actually see a reason to purchase the more expensive bakers.Sourdough Tips: There is leeway in the amount of water that can be used in a natural yeast sourdough recipe. I've found the crust bakes crispier and thicker in the Lekue the wetter my dough is. Also, I like to rise my dough for 24 hours and I keep a wet towel or plastic wrap over the closed bakers the entire time so the open edges won't harden the dough as it proofs. As for browning the crust, the quality of the loaf is the same whether the bread browns or stays completely white. So for my bread I only needed the brown crust to make it pretty, which is what I want when I give my bread away. It was hard to figure out how to brown the loaf because it didn't matter whether I baked with the Lekue open or closed, the bread would stay completely white. I learned to use enough dough to rise to the top of the baker, because everywhere the dough touches the baker, It gets a nice brown color.My investment into Sourdough breads was nominal because of this baker. Easy use, easy to store, and super easy to clean.

The ad for this reminds me of all the inflatable swimming pools you see with an obviously photoshopped family of four swimming in the pool, but when you order it, it turns out you can barely fit one person in it! Ha! I don't know how big the model is with her hands in the bread bowl, but on the charts of American males, I'm pretty spot-on average for size and weight and the photo of my hand in the bowl tells a different story. So far, the bowl has been great as far as mixing, rising, and baking bread all in the same container. And it washes up great too. It is not, however, large enough for us to bake our normal bread recipes without scaling down ingredients to fit.

This clever product has made baking everyday loaves of sourdough bread for my family even easier. Being able to mix the dough, let it ferment & rise, and bake a single loaf in one easy-to-clean container makes it practically effortless to make a loaf of really tasty bread several times a week. It's the perfect size for the loaves produced by the recipes in my go-to bread baking book, Artisan Sourdough Made Simple.Cleanup is easy: just toss it in the dishwasher. Dried on bits of dough and even bits of melted cheese that may leak out from our family favourite, cheddar/jalapeno bread, wash out in the DW. It's easy to store in a drawer.It took a few tries to figure out how to get a nice crust and maximum oven spring. When shaping the loaf prior to rising, I make sure there's enough surface tension on the dough so it holds its shape. To get a "football" shaped loaf, close the top during the rise and for the first 25 min of baking. Placing the Lekue on top of a preheated pizza stone in the oven, baking at 430 degrees (the maximum rating for the silicone) with the top closed for 25 min and then open for the final 20 min of baking produces a beautiful, tasty, dark golden crust and a soft but chewy inner crumb for sourdough that has been allowed to rise slowly (15+ hours) in the refrigerator, then an additional 1-2 hour rise at room temperature.For novices: the recipes in the enclosed booklet aren't very good. You'll find lots of bread recipes on line that produce better results. This Lekue is the right size for loaves that contain about 800-900 g of dough (about 4 cups of flour and 1 1/2 cups water). Have fun!