An In-Depth Look At The Kenwood BM450 Breadmaker
The Kenwood BM450 must be one of the most highly-rated automatic breadmakers on the market today. The designers have equipped the machine with all the features you might need – and they work too.
What could be moe appealing than just adding the ingredients to the breadmaker and switching it on – perhaps on a timer if you want. After a few hours, or in the morning you return to the machine, greeted by the aroma of fresh baking.
What does this maker have to offer in particular?
A choice of 15 pre-set programs, covering all sorts of bread. Simple white or brown of course, but also wholegrain, French, sweet and craftsman-type doughs can be handled. There’s also a gluten-free option and even a program for jam-making.
An automatic dispenser will add dried fruit, nuts and other ingredients to the mix when the time is right (adding them during the kneading cycle will crush them).
The machine will produce three different sizes of loaf, from 500g to 1kg and there’s also a choice of how brown you want the crust to be – light, medium or dark.
There’s a 15 hour delay timer so you can wake up to fresh bread, or have it ready when you get in from work. It will even keep your bread warm for an hour after is has finished baking.
Once you have some experience, you can design your own programs and store them on the Kenwood BM450, in addition to the 15 supplied, so can fine-tune your own favourite recipes.
It’s a good-looking piece of kit as well – stainless steel with a smoked glass panel which incorporates the touch-sensitive controls and digital display.
Do remember that a bread maker takes up quite a bit of room. So it will probably need to be kept out on the counter and needs to be easy on the eye.
The lid is removable for cleaning, and contains a clear panela and a light so you can see how your bread is coming along.
A commonly-reported problem with bread makers is difficulty in actually getting the loaf out of the tin. The mixing paddle remains behind while the loaf is extracted. One of the good features of the BM450 is how easy that is, compared to other machines on the market.
Any downsides? Some have remarked that it is perhaps not as quiet as some, although that is not a common criticism. A few have said that the touch controls can be a bit erratic and that it’s not difficult to accidentally switch the wrong control. I think you would easily get used to the machine and not make that mistake.
That’s about as far as it goes for criticisms. The Kenwood BM450 is a highly-rated capable machine. Hundreds of users have been sufficiently impressed to take time to say so, which tells you something. We believe that you would be just as impressed.