We have had it for about a year and we make bread daily and occasionally dough for pizza or banana cake. It makes incredibly tasty bread, but we had to try a bunch of recipes and flours to find the perfect one for us. Needless to say, its bread is healthy as we use flour and not flavor and texture enhancers that unfortunately all ovens add nowadays. After a year of daily use, the coating of the pan has started to peel off, but for now the bread does not stick. However, I suspect that in the future I will have to look for a new pan.
When it kneads, it makes quite a noise, so practically you cannot program it to have warm bread ready in the morning (unless everyone in the house sleeps incredibly heavily...). From what I saw in hindsight, if someone wants a silent bread maker, they should probably go for Panasonic (especially the model with a separate yeast compartment).
In the bread recipes, we initially had the following problem: It has 3 different sources for recipes: the accompanying booklet, a PDF with recipes on the accompanying CD, and another PDF with recipes on their website. No recipe is the same, resulting in us not knowing which one to experiment with. If the flour is of good quality (e.g. hard yellow flour with a high protein content), then with the specified yeast, the bread would rise excessively and stick to the lid. If the flour did not have enough protein, even with reduced yeast, the bread would not rise properly. Initially, of course, we did not know the importance of hard flour and its quality based on its protein content (this is also the reason why even in whole wheat bread or cornbread we add hard flour).
In the end, we ended up with the following recipe (which can certainly be used with other bread makers as well): 380ml water, 3 to 4 tablespoons of olive oil, one and a half tablespoons of salt, one and a half to two tablespoons of sugar, half a teaspoon of dry yeast (equivalent to about 1.3 grams of yeast), and 600 grams of yellow hard flour for rustic bread.
As for flours, we initially tried all the brands from supermarkets and found that most of them were expensive to very expensive and of mediocre quality. Of course, there were 1-2 exceptions, but they were still expensive and exclusively single-grain. So we started looking for yellow flour from mills and finding cooperating stores that sold them. In the end, we settled for the 5-kilo yellow flour from Dakou mills, which gives very tasty bread and has a good price. Of course, there are other options that you can find by searching on the Internet and contacting them by phone, so don't limit yourself to the exact mediocrity of supermarkets.
Update: 2nd year
We changed the pan for about 30 euros. We still use it daily, but now we stop the process before baking starts and we bake the bread ourselves in the oven in a casserole dish or a closed pot. We have and use a stainless steel pot with a diameter of 28 centimeters. The result is truly amazing. We can use program 1 and stop the operation before baking starts or use programs 10 or 11 that prepare dough. We put the dough on a piece of non-stick paper on which we have sprinkled some flour and shape it like a loaf. We cover the dough for 30-40 minutes to let it rise. Meanwhile, we preheat the oven to 230 degrees Celsius in air mode and place the pot to warm up for 5 to 10 minutes. Once the dough has risen, we score it with a knife in 2 places and place it in the pot with non-stick paper. We bake at 230 degrees Celsius (air mode) for 35 minutes with the lid on the pot (casserole) and then at 200 degrees Celsius (air mode) for 20 minutes without the lid. You may need to adjust the times slightly according to your oven's capabilities. The result, however, is a delicious rustic loaf of bread with a crispy crust that is far superior to bread baked by the baker alone.
Last update and end of an era...
We finally bought a 1000W Bosch kitchen machine for kneading bread. It is relatively quiet and in 9 minutes we knead dough with 1 kilogram of flour, which yields 1.5 kilograms of bread. We bake it in 2 loaf pans, cut them in half, and freeze them once they cool down. This way, we have fresh bread for at least 4 days. It is worth noting that after extensive research, we found that the best flour for bread dough is from Papafilis, as it contains bran that makes the bread rise incredibly. The baker was ultimately a necessary transitional stage, but now with the kitchen machine, we eat better and more economical bread. For those interested, here is the recipe for the dough: 1 kilogram of flour (1kg yellow flour or a combination of whole wheat flour 400g and yellow flour 600g), 590-600ml lukewarm water, 2 teaspoons of salt, 4 teaspoons of sugar, 6 tablespoons of oil, 1 packet of dry yeast. Procedure: Knead the bread in the kitchen machine for 8 to 10 minutes. Then cover the bowl and let the dough rise until it doubles in size (usually takes 50-60 minutes). Grease a baking tray and place the risen dough in it. Cut it in half and make 2 loaves. We sprinkle plenty of sesame seeds on the greased surface of the dough. Cover the tray for 40 to 50 minutes and then bake the bread. In our oven, we set the temperature to 190 degrees Celsius on the bottom heating element, place the tray on the bottom part of the oven, and bake for 1 hour and 5 minutes. Remove the bread and immediately cut the loaves in half because we noticed that this keeps the bread crispy and prevents it from becoming soft. Let it cool on a rack and then place the bread we want to consume in the next few days in the freezer.