Sorry, it’s a 2 lb breadmaker she won’t use, and it’s the kitchenaid with which she won’t knead to completion.

You’re lucky- baking is one thing about which I know little to nothing, so you don’t have to expect a tome from me. I will say my wife, Jenny, loved the Brother Juniper book, and soon after she read it was spending much of her available time in the kitchen- to this day, she has mixed feelings about baking because of the excess to which she drove herself baking in those early years. And you must understand that living 2 miles from Forestville, CA, original home of Brother Juniper’s Bakery (which later moved to Santa Rosa), we were influenced by the wafting aromas and the local culinary culture. She has gone to excess trying to create the perfect challah, the perfect pizza, the perfect this and that. Such obsession can either drive one to swear off entirely, or drive one mad. In Jenny’s case, both (grin). To this day, she won’t use a perfectly good Oster 1 lb. bread maker, but insists on at least doing the final portion of kneading by hand. She won’t make challah unless it’s enough to take challah with a brocho, then the marathon baking session. Needless to say, she doesn’t bake bread often. For me, almost immediate fresh-baked bread from the Oster is compelling enough, but she will have none of it, which means that since she’s the baker, we almost never have fresh home-baked bread– it’s either frozen loaves from her super-sized batches or more likely, baker bread (now that we live near a bakery).

I can’t recommend Peter Reinhart’s books. Once having read them, few people walk away unscathed.