Breadmakers: How we test breadmakers
Testing breadmaker programs
The smell of home-baked bread is enough to make you hungry, but is the bread itself any good? To judge a breadmaker's quality, we bake white and wholemeal loaves on the basic and delay-setting programs. We also bake with easy-to-use bread mixes.
You can see the differences between a good and bad breadmaker and find out what it takes to become a Which? Best Buy in our video:
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Testing breadmakers
We've baked over 178kg of bread during our tests
We're really harsh on the breadmakers we test, rating the homemade loaves for appearance, texture and smell.
We even rate the crust on both the upper and lower parts of the loaf. Only a well baked, good-looking loaf will do.
We assess how well browned the loaf is, and we also get our experts to rate how even the crumb texture on the inside is, and rate the quality of all the bread made overall.
Our testing has produced a mountain of more than 300 loaves loaves of bread, weighing over 300kg, and we've clocked up over 700 hours of baking time.
How to use a breadmaker
We assess how easy the breadmakers are to set up, load, program, unload and clean. We also record how many times the kneading paddle sticks in the baked loaf. We assess noise, too.
All of the Which? Best Buy breadmakers are both easy to use and easy to keep clean. They're also much quieter than other models we've tested.
Total test score
Our total test score for breadmakers ignores price and is made up of the following factors:
Breadmaking performance 65%
This includes: white and wholemeal bread, delay timer, packet mix, how much the paddle sticks.
Convienience 35%
This includes: using the breadmaker, noise, cleaning, build quality.
