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My wife bakes bread once a week, the whole process taking a total of about 3 hours. She mixes up the ingredients, lets it rise for an hour in a warm place, punches it back down, puts the dough in the baking pans, lets it rise for 45 min, then bakes for 30 min. The end result tastes so good that store bought bread, even the freshly baked loaves from Whole Foods, are disappointments, and the "Wonderbread" type mass-produced loaves come across as slightly toxic waste by comparison. Her bread lasts for a week without molding or going bad. I've been disappointed by all of the bread machine loaves that I've tried, as they tend to have a fairly heavy consistency and rank somewhere below the Whole Foods loaves, but well above the "wonderbread loaves". She started baking her own because it was so difficult to find store bought bread that didn't have HFCS, corn syrup, or wheat gluten listed in their ingredients. And after tasting the results of of her home baked bread, we've never gone back to the store for bread.
Another side effect of home baking we've noticed is that something about the process of kneading dough makes your fingernails grow back much stronger. Something in the yeast maybe.
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