Breadman TR520 Programmable Bread Maker for 1-, 1-1/2-, and 2-Pound Loaves

For the price, it's a pretty good bread machine. One thing I would add is this... If you are not using the brand of yeast recommended by Breadman, your results may not be good. Their recipes were tested using Red Star Yeast Active Dry Yeast. Not all yeasts will yield the same result. Know how the yeast you're using will perform.

I use an organic yeast, and when I used the amount recommended in the first white bread recipe, (1 Tbsp for a 2 lb loaf), the bread rose and fell. The taste was okay, but I knew when the loaf didn't dome, that the problem was too much yeast.

I used (1 3/4 tsp of organic yeast for a 1 1/2 lb loaf) for whole wheat bread, and it came out absolutely perfect. The bread was just as good as the whole wheat bread I used to purchase at the grocery store for $3.50 a loaf. Now that I know that I have to adjust the amount of yeast since I'm not using the one tested for their recipes, I am very happy with my machine. I would...Read more

I bought this to replace a more sophisticated programmable Breadman Ultimate that I had used once or twice a week, sometimes more frequently, for several years. The machine still worked, but the kneading assembly finally just fell out of the bread pan (the shaft, etc.), and there were no replacement bread pans available for that machine. (I looked high and low!)

I looked at a number of different machines before choosing this one. It seemed that people who bought Breadman machines were satisfied with this one, but the successor machine to the Ultimate received disappointed reviews from people who had owned the Ultimate. I also looked at other brands, and for one reason or another, rejected them. One of them, when you look at the manual, you discover that the ONLY setting for one pound and one and a half pound loaves is the "fast" setting, and the other settings are available only for the two lb loaves. Since I almost always bake one and a half pound loaves, this surprised...Read more

We bake a loaf about every 5 days, usually basic white or honey wheat. We've also made herb breads, seed breads and pizza dough. This is our first and only bread machine so we've nothing to compare it to, but seems great to us. The loaves are beautiful and almost always perfect - we've only had one loaf that didn't turn out (don't know why). There's a timer that lets us set it up the night before and wake to the smell of fresh bread baking... mmmm...... The paddle does tend to take a largish chunk of bread with it when the loaf comes out of the pan. The writing is hard to read as others have said, but we use the default setting 95% of the time so we don't have to read anything - just hit start. For an inexpensive breadmaker, it's really great. We've had ours 7 months.