What a bargain!

I'd like to just echo the aggregate Internet opinion of this machine: It does a great job and is amazing value for the price, but the manual is terrible.

I first tried their recipe for French bread and it came out with a sunken top and a mealy, heavy texture. So I chalked that up to the poor manual and went with an Internet recipe instead:

4 1/3 cups flour
1 1/3 cups water
2 tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
1 1/4 tsp yeast

2 lb French cycle

THAT turned out almost perfect.

To add insult to injury, on one page the manual says the pan is dishwasher safe, and on another says to never put the pan in the dishwasher. Whatever. The machine is so cheap I don't feel like I'll have to treat it with kid gloves.

As a bonus, there is a recipe for masa (corn tortilla dough), but only in the Spanish language portion of the manual (I guess they figure English speakers don't have any use for it). I'm tempted to run it through Google's translator, but then I imagine better recipes can, once again, be found on the net.

I haven't yet tried to get fancy and make anything other than basic French bread. Even if the machine were incapable of anything else, I'd still conclude that it's a fantastic bargain.