Recommendations For A Good Bread Machine Please

It depends. If I am giving it to children, I would add butter.
Some people would say that olive oil or butter would make the bread come out with better texture. May be true. Upto 20 grams of one of these should be fine. You decide how much. You need to use the oil on the surface of the baking dish, to get a nice color, as well as release the bread off the surface.

As for brand-name, I have an old "National" brand. More than 10 years old. Same as Panasonic. Go with something that is sturdy-heavy, as well as within your budget. Lift the box and see. If you are mail ordering, order one that you had lifted-and-seen in a b&m store. Heavier bread dough kneaders would stay put, and not "walk" off your counter when the paddle is working on the mass.

You will have to take out the kneaded dough, flatten, distribute nuts, fruits, whatever, let it re-rise ( proofing step), in the baking pan you'd use. Most bread machines would have a stop after the knead step (it will beep for you to take out the dough). To have it rerise within the bread machine's basket, you'd have to forget to take it out for an additional hour or so. And then you'd shape and transfer it to the baking dish. That is all there is to it. My preference is to take it out as soon as the machine beeps for me (this is the way with unleavened items -- like roti-dough, or pasta-dough), process it on a cookie sheet outside the machine, and the let it sit in the baking dish with a wet cloth over it for a while.
One key advantage of baking in a conventional oven is that we can humidify the oven with a large shallow pan of water set under the baking dish(es) -- this is not really feasible in a bread maker.

 

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1. I don’t have one
2. Stand mixtures are expensive, and messy in winters when electrostatics can cause flour to fly up everywhere . A bread machine is a crude stand mixture with a LID, and cheap.

 

You got me interested in a bread maker as well ! Amazon’s best seller:
Hamilton Beach Programmable Bread Machine, 2-Pound Bread Maker with Gluten-Free Setting (29882)

 

If you are a daily home roti maker, notice their feature line: "GREAT FOR DOUGH PREP: In addition to bread, you can make pizza dough, cakes, jams, flatbreads and croissants. "

 

I was hoping you would buy it first

 

I Just bought that as a gift. I shall let you know when I hear from my “gifted” on how it worked.

 

OK ... this Hamilton-Beach bread machine is going to be in a few homes during the holidays.

• Check out their pamphlet for their bread recipe, and compare that with my generic one:400g flour, 300g water, 4 g salt, 8 g sugar, 20 g butter or oliveoil, 6 g dry-yeast. Put everything into the bread machine's basket and let it knead away. [use luke-warm water; yeast likes that]
  
• Compare the bread you get from baking it in a conventional oven versus inside the bread machine.
  
• Make roti(pulka) dough (flour, luke-warm water, salt, oil/ghee) with your recipe, and see how well kneaded the dough is compared to your previous method.

Post your experimental findings here.