My husband was the first in our family to buy a bread machine (still can't
believe he got interested in bread making <g>). He bought the West Bend
Automatic Bread machine which makes a very pretty horizontal loaf,
(In my opinion this is the way a loaf of bread should look), and has two
paddles, one on each end.
He made some wonderful loaves of bread with this machine and I never heard
him complain about it. He later added a vertical machine to his collection,
and I bought a toastmaster, vertical, for me. Makes butter, jam, etc. along
with bread and dough. I've recently started using it for the dough cycle
and baking the bread, rolls or whatever in the oven.
BTW Rosemary (who said, "Considering how to spend a couple hundred bucks
(actually closer to $300) on a bread related appliance, I would opt for a
large Kitchen Aid mixer. Can your bread machine whip 16 egg whites for an
angel food cake or whip 1/4 cup cream for whipped cream? The KA mixer
can.") my Toastmaster cost less that $100.00, you can toss the
ingredients in and forget it for about an hour, it does all the kneading
and mixing, beeps when it's finished and you can dump it out and make it
into whatever you want with not much clean up. I have a KA, which I love,
but like the bread machine better for making the dough.
Martha