!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what if the cost of food goes up 10x?

Jerry Brown wrote:"Bread prices will be getting high"...
the machine bakes only one loaf at a time -- takes ~4 hours. About 10 minutes of my time to load the ingredients in the machine.

I admit that my homemade machine bread tends to have extra ingredients. To make it easier, I put all the shelf stable ingredients, pre-measured, in a set of jars in a drawer used for just that purpose. I make up 9 to 12 mixes at a time. Then I just pour the dry ingredients into the bowl, add the yeast and the wet ingredients, and push the button.

I do a simpler system with sourdough starter I've had for years and a Dutch oven in our regular oven. I've been told that the bread is more digestible because it sits to rise for 8 to 12 hours before baking. In the winter, the heat from the oven warms up the area on cold mornings. If we get hot weather, the bread machine will be used, and I've been known to move it outside if the weather's exceptionally hot.

It’s nice to have the option of moving heat sources outside during hot weather, isn’t it?

I wanted a bread machine, myself 30 or 35 years ago. I found one in a thrift shop as well. It worked well and it made good bread but after a while, the bread seemed extremely boring. Identical texture, identical flavor. After six months, the bread machine went back to the thrift shop. My daughter was about eight at the time. I taught her how to make bread and she became very good at it.