Zojirushi Virtuoso Plus vs Zojirushi Supreme

What a Real Person Thinks

Thomas R. – Spokane, WA

So, you want delicious bread that you can make at the push of a button?This will do it and it makes even more than bread, did you know that? I didn’t, I thought it would just make bread. So if you’re in the market looking for a bread machine, have you considered these Zojirushi?

Today, what we’re gonna be doing is a little bit of a product review. I have my Zojirushi bread machine here. This is the BB-PAC20 bread maker. This is the virtuoso model. I’ve had this for about three years, four years now I would say, and I got this because I enjoy baking bread and even better when the machine does it for me. Though, usually I used to do this by hand, I bake my bread with my stand mixer and even before that, with a handheld mixer, which was a ton of work and it takes quite a long time if you’ve ever made homemade bread before, you know that it takes at least a half day sometimes an entire day, or even more if you’re gonna be doing something overnight like sour dough starter.

This bread maker makes that whole process much simpler. Before we get started, let’s just do a little quick overview of what this thing bread maker comes with,. comes with a instruction manual, comes with the machine itself, came with a measuring cup as well as a measuring spoon. Inside the box, you’ll also find the bread loaf container, it comes with two paddles, this helps to knead the dough and the key tip here is that you have these aligned. The first time I use this bread maker , I think I got lucky my bread came out just fine. But the second time that I used it, they were not aligned so, kind of like how they are right now one is pointing one way one’s pointed this way, If you do it like that, you’re gonna get a lopsided loaf. So, if you’re doing sour dough starter may not matter but if you’re actually gonna finish and bake the loaf inside here, you might end up with a lopsided a piece of bread or a loaf of bread. So, what you do is just rotate until you have these blades, pointing in the same direction.

So I just use it, I just do like a 90 degree angle like that pointed pointed that way,for both of them. So, right now they’re just about the same and that way you want to end up with any lopsided loaves so, key point there. First thing that I do when I’m baking bread with my machine is, you need to follow the directions. If you’ve never done it before, you always put in the liquids first and you put in the dry ingredients like the flour, the salt and then the yeast or sugar or whatever it is, that’s dry. And then you put it in, you set whatever course that you’re gonna use. So there’s a quick courses, there’s regular courses, there’s basic, there’s wheat, there’s gluten-free as well as dough, jam courses so you can make jam like fruit jams, as well as cake or sourdough starters. I have only stuck with basic wheat, dough and sourdough starter. I haven’t tried the jam and cake or gluten free so I can’t speak to those, but given the results that I’ve had with all the other courses, I’m sure it’s going to taste just fine. So, the machine is very straightforward to use.

One of the things that the manual is going to outline for you is the difference between active dry yeast or rapid rise yeast. So, rapid rise yeast works a little bit faster than active dry yeast in this bread maker. I’ve never used it, I always use active dry yeast. So, the measurements are gonna be a little bit different and it also gives you the weights as well as the volume for the liquid. I always measure out my dry ingredients, I found I always have a little bit more success that way, that’s what the professional baker’s do as well, so, I’d highly recommend if you don’t have a scale to get one. I have a pretty small scale here, which is sufficient enough for my home home baking purposes. This is a 2 kilogram scale, and that’s what I use to measure out all of my ingredients when I bake, so definitely invest in a scale. They don’t cost too much like 20 bucks for example, and you should be able to see some better results with your baking if you have a scale and you use it with the bb cec20 home bakery.

One of the reasons why I bought this bread maker versus the bb cec20 home bakery is that there’s a little viewing window, you can see what’s going on inside. There’s also a heater on the top part, so it’s going to heat and bake everything evenly versus just from the bottom. There’s also a timer function, so you can set this so that the baking finishes in the morning,
so you’ll be woken up by the smell of fresh bread in your house, which is just like amazing.

It’s a great reason to wake up in addition to hot coffee or the smell of coffee, so you can wake up to the smell of coffee plus the smell of fresh-baked white bread or wheat bread from your bb cec20 home bakery You can also control the crust, so there’s a light, a medium and a dark. I only stick to the light and the medium, the dark is a little bit too thick and dark for my taste, so if you want your bread machine to make thick and dark crust, maybe that’s gonna be your thing.

The bread maker menu is very intuitive to use, it’s, there’s only a handful of buttons really and the bread maker manual does a great job explaining how you need to move in between the different items on the bb cec20 home bakery supreme. So, some of the pros and cons of this bread machine, this makes it very large loaf as you can see here, it’s about two pounds for one loaf, which is sufficient for maybe I don’t know, for four to five people for I don’t know three three days, if you cut up this loaf into sandwich slices, it’s probably enough for like eight sandwiches like big sandwiches. You have like a family of four or five one loaf should last you several days. If you are just one or two people then you’ll probably have leftovers that you might want to freeze. One thing about homemade bread is that it doesn’t have any preservatives, if you don’t eat it right away, you need to put it in their freezer or the refrigerator, probably the freezer is better so it doesn’t get hard because it’s gonna mold. I’ve had my bread mold because I didn’t eat it quick enough and I did not like that. So, some of the other pros, like I said, the quantity is very big, the timer function is great, especially if you want to plan ahead, I use the bread maker often for making pizza dough. So, I’ll set it, I’ll measure everything out, put the pizza dough ingredients in there and my dough will be ready, a few hours later, which is great. Like I said before, all of the different things that the bb cec20 home bakery supreme can make, it can make dough it can make different types of bread, it can make sourdough starter, all those different things. So, it’s not just a bread machine, it does all kinds of other things which is pretty cool, so the word for that is versatile. It also makes a beeping noise, which might be annoying for some people, but it’s good if you need to mix something in like nuts, or fruits like dried raisins, if you want to make raisin bread, wheat bread or nut bread.

The bread maker will beep when you need to add those things in at the end, or it’ll tell you when your dough is ready, if you’re doing a dough course, it’ll beep when the dough is ready to be baked or if you need to manipulate it further in the bb cec20 home bakery supreme. So, for example like French bread if you want to make a French baguette, you can make the dough in the bread machine and then divide up your dough into long baguette pieces and score it.

So, some of the cons, this bread maker does get a little bit noisy when it’s kneading the bread because it’s, it’s you know there’s a huge, there’s a heavy weight in the middle. So, it’s going on like one wah-wah-wah. If the bread maker makes that noise, when it’s doing the kneading, so if you live in a small space like a studio, for example or if you have this going early in the morning when you’re sleeping, you might get woken up. I remember the first time that I did it in the morning, early in the morning, I got kind of woken I was like, what the hell is that? and it was the machine.

The other con I would say is you see these paddles here, these are gonna create holes in the bottom of your whole wheat bread loaf. Now if you’re cutting it, and if you aren’t showing the underside of your whole wheat bread loaf to anybody it doesn’t really matter, but, I guess some people if for aesthetic reasons, they might not want holes on the bottom of their loaves, that could be a con as well. So yeah, that’s I think that’s pretty much it for this bread machine.

Those are the the pros and the cons that I can think of if you have any that I miss make sure to let me know in the comments. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this bread machine, we definitely recommend it. Some of the tips that I have, I have probably about seven tips like I mentioned before make sure that you weigh out your ingredients, that’ll leave a little bit less room for error versus measuring for measuring using cups and spoons and so on. Always weigh your ingredients like the professionals do, also make sure to follow the directions in the manual. So I always start with a sour dough starter liquid, you have liquid first, layer on the dry ingredients and then put the yeast on top, that’s what they recommend. When this thing when it starts to bake it gets very warm. If you’re gonna be opening freshly baked bread, there might be some steam that’s accumulated inside, so if you open it, be very careful because I got a whiff of really hot steam one time when I open it. I was like, whoa so you got to be careful there. In addition, you want to use oven mitts when you’re taking this out because these metal handles are gonna be really hot. After you take it out with your oven mitts, flip it over on a cutting board, so, once you flip this over, you’ll notice that there’s little screws here if the bread doesn’t come out right away, it might be stuck on the, the paddle and all you have to do is rotate these.

Again, you should use your mitts because it’s very hot. You can rotate these and this will help to rotate the screws or the paddles that are on the other side of the bread maker and that’ll help to get out your loaf much easier. The other thing that I wanted to mention, sometimes these paddles will get stuck. And I found that it’s usually because some ingredients like flour or something else has got in between, so, I usually use like a little a squeegee, you know those little fuzzy squeegee things just clean out the middle,and also spray the insides of these with cooking spray and thenput them in and that way they’ll just come right out but if for whatever reason they do get stuck just soak it in some hot water and then give it a little bit of a jiggle, and then they should come out eventually.So, like I was saying this thing does get hot so keep it away from that’s heat sensitive.

You don’t want to put chocolate near by, you don’t want to put anything like plastic, anything that might melt near the bread maker because it does get very hot, just like light sourdough starter. So try to keep it somewhere safe or it’s not going to cause anything to melt or damage anything that’s heat sensitive like sour dough starter. What I would recommend if you’ve never used a bread machine before, start out with the recipes in this book. And once you’ve mastered a few of them, then you can go ahead and try to modify some other recipes that are not originally from the bread maker book and try to incorporate them using the bread machine. All you have to do if you’re using a recipe that isn’t from this book is to put in the ingredients in the correct order and your bread will come out just as good if not better.

If you’re wondering one of my favorite recipes in this bread maker book, aside from the cinnamon raisin bread, which is just like awesome, you need to try that one for sure, is the pizza dough with beer. I’ve never made my pizza doughs with beer before but after I tried this recipe I was like, whoa, I have been missing out like, beer adds a lot of flavor to your dough? So here if you’re kind of tired of the same old pizza dough recipe, make sure you try with beer and you will be impressed. You got to use a good canned cheap beer, you got to use a decent German,I use the German, I think it was a wheat beer I forgot what it was called, but you want to use a decent like a not a cheap beer not an expensive beer but something in the middle and with a good wheaty flavor, like any good wheat bread.

That is my recommendation for a pizza dough, light sourdough starter, and the cinnamon raisin bread recipe that’s in this book. Those are my top two favorites for this bread maker. Alright guys, so I think that was pretty much it if I missed anything, I’ll make sure to put it in the description below, you have any comments, questions or tips make sure to share them so that we can learn about the zojirushi bb cec20 home from each other.

See ya! My favorite part about this machine is the little looking glass, so you can see how your bread is doing. It’s always fun to check on things that you get to eat that come from my zojirushi bb cec20 home.