The breadmaking revival has started and Panasonic are ideally placed to take advantage with a range of breadmakers that has the competition floundering. These high quality bread baking machines, particularly the Panasonic SD255, tick all the right boxes and are flying off the shelves at the moment.

The surge in interest in home bread making has come about following the huge rise in the price of wheat. Traditional bakeries have had to hike the cost of their loaves to such an extent, that a high quality wholemeal loaf of bread can now cost as much as £1.50, which soon adds up when you think that many families can get through one loaf per day.

Home breadmakers not only provide the opportunity to save money, the bread they turn out tastes great and then there's the convenience of being able to turn out a fresh loaf whenever you need - no need to get in your car to nip down the local shop when you run out.

The top of the range SD255 model from Panasonic is easily the best model we've reviewed and everyone we asked said the same thing. It sports 19 different programmes to cater for many different bread types, has a "fast bake" facility that actually works and also has an automatic ingredient dispenser - some bread needs ingredients to be added part-way through the cycle, so unless you're happy to wait around and do this manually, the auto dispenser feature is a must.

Price - available everywhere at around £99 and rarely discounted at the moment due to demand

• Bakes 3 loaf sizes
• 19 Bake Programmes
• Auto dried fruit and nut dispenser
• Rye Bread bake mode
• Crust type selection
• Full timer facilities
• Large loaf capacity
• Cool Touch enclosure
• 13 hour time delay
• includes manual and recipe book
• Dough only mode
• 10 minute power interuption protection