As a kid I used to walk past an ABC factory on my way to school. The smell was horrid!
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I used to avoid Asda because their instore bakery made currant buns and I couldnāt take the smell and used to throw up outside for some strange reason. Funny how some smells get to you.
I used to work next door to the Seabrooks crisp factory in Bradford. The smell was horrific. They had skips of rotting potato peel in the yard at the back, which bordered onto where I worked. In summer, you couldnāt open a window within 200m of the place.
Just to add to this thread, weāve used a breadmaker for many years, but have never used one to bake bread. We only use it to make the dough and always cook it in the oven. It works better that way and you can make whatever shape of bread or rolls you like.
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Itās almost certainly the products of fermentation being driven off - cakes donāt usually have a fermentation step, and rise because of baking soda (recognising there are exceptions). This might be especially true if the yeast is not entirely āgoodā and produces funny alcohols and related waste products, driven off in baking so the bread still tastes ok.
Has anyone tried baking bread in an air fryer??? Iāve seen a few articles about it and thought, how versatile the air fryers appear to be.
I know that cakes are (generally) completely different but I was talking about bread made with the same recipe but baked in a bread maker rather than an oven. I donāt see how it can possibly be the fermentation products unless the baking process itself is so different from an oven that the yeast behaves differently 
Sorry, Iād misunderstood. Maybe itās to do with the materials used to construct the bread maker, giving off smells, or possibly the (different) yeast used instead of normal baking yeast.
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Think I may get oneā¦!
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If you do get an air fryer, @Bonzocat , I think you should probably be quite careful with which one you get! We bought a reasonably cheapy to try it out and, to be honest, found that a mini-oven worked better for us for almost everything (even chips!!). We have friends who love their air fryer and do lots of things in it so it probably depends on what yu like cooking as well.
As for the no-knead bread - surely that would work just as well in a small oven? Just thinking, so if you fancy one donāt let me put you off 
Iām a lazy cook. If a pill existed to satisfy my hunger and my nutritional needsā¦.!
Shall research it well if decide to get one. I already have a mini electric oven but it gets so dirty - grease baked on to the sides, like a gas oven does, which Iāve got and donāt use any more.
Cooking is so messyā¦.!
We have a philips unit - not a cheapie - and itās useful for chips, but not spectacular. TBH itās just like a fan oven only smaller.
We have a Tefal Actifry XL.
As others have said, an air fryer is just a (smaller, and therefore cheaper to run) fan oven, unless you get one with frills (like ours): it has a little paddle thing in the lower compartment which rotates and agitates whatever is in there so it cooks and browns evenly.
We do a no-knead, slow prove bread in a small metal casserole. Works great.
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Do you use āordinaryā yeast for that, or are you a sourdough fan? (I tried sourdough but couldnāt keep up with looking after the sponge or whatever itās technicalled called )
For that one we just use dried yeast. As make it on top of our normal sourdough (we eat a lot of bread I guess!)
Sounds interesting. As Iāve abandoned sourdough (
), I wonder if you could please point me to the rescipe you use for the āno kneadā bread? My partner eats a lot of bread but it often disagrees with me so I donāt it it muchā¦
The problem is often the impact on the digestive system of the incomplete fermentation products from the yeasts that are sold these days - they come with enzymes designed to speed up the fermentation process. Hence the benefits of sourdough breads where the fermentation is natural.
Yes indeed - I understood that was often the problem. Weāve been buying sourdough bread from the market recently but it tends to beā¦how shall I put thisā¦ A bit substantial 
Sourdough is - you could build a house with it! 