Re: Why?
Upvote for Nathan Myhrvold, "Modernist Bread". Not bought it (because $400 for a multi-volume set I'll never scratch the surface of), but some of it was covered in places like Physics World, and a few of the ideas got me back into doing bread and sourdough. (Still got to try the pineapple juice thing...)
There is still some convenience in a bread maker handling the different stages for you, so you don't have to wait at home, or get up in the middle of the night. And there's one other thing, related to another tip from that book, that a bread maker does, but you can reproduce without one: baking in a small enclosed space traps the escaping steam, giving a thinner, softer crust, as a steam oven would do. If you don't have a steam oven you can bake your bread inside a larger container; a pair of metal oven dishes, one inverted on top of the other, or a second bread tin upside down on top of the first will do the trick.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
