I had adopted a recipe for manually making whole wheat sandwich buns into one that could be made partially in a bread machine.  The original recipe called for 7 - 8 cups of whole wheat flour so I cut the recipe in half in order to use my breadmaker.  I then found "Rogers Best for bread 100% whole wheat flour" which worked out very well.  The store where I purchased the flour was phased out of our town and finding it in other stores is hit and miss at best.  Is there any other way of keeping 100% whole wheat without buying "best for bread 100% whole wheat flour"?

Sorry to be vague.  The recipe I adapted has: 1 cup warm water, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons honey, 2 tablespoons plain yogurt (or unsweetened applesauce), 1 teaspoon salt, 3 1/2 cups "best for bread" wholewheat flour, and 1 tablespoon yeast.  Occasionally I will add about 1/2 cup grated cheese to the recipe or else 50 grams of chopped candied ginger. 

Basically I toss everything in the machine, set it to "dough" and, once it is done I roll the dough out and cut it with a 4" cookie cutter to make 8 buns.  Let raise for 30 minutes and bake for 15 minutes at 375 degrees.  Any ideas would be gratefully appreciated.

Grace

Hello,

I am a beginner home bread baker. I have understanding of the basics of bread baking using hand mixing/kneading and bread machine cycles. I have owned a bread maker for the last 10 years and, after putting the machine away for the better part of 7 years (because I got tired of baking the same bread all the time), I decided to bake again.

I found a delicious-sounding recipe in one of my favorite bread cookbooks --Beth Hensperger's The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook. In the section called "Sweet Loaves" the author has "Mexican Chocolate Bread." The first time I tried the recipe, the end result was a brick! It did not rise. My Breadman bread maker does not have the "sweet bread" cycle the recipe recommends. So, I programmed the machine for the "batter bread/cake." The dough was batter-like and it did not behave like the other dough I was familiar with.

The recipe calls for a total of 1½ cups of liquids (1 cup of milk and ½ cup orange juice), and 2 large eggs. There are 3½ cups of bread flour called for; ⅓ cup light brown sugar (or piloncillo) and ⅔ cup grated Mexican chocolate Ibarra brand (whose main ingredient is sugar). 

The rest of the ingredients are: 4 TBSP unsalted butter, ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 TBSP + 1 tsp gluten, 1½ tsp salt, 1½ tsp instant espresso powder, 1 tsp ground cinnamon and 1 TBSP bread machine yeast (or 2½ tsp SAF yeast).

Before attempting the bread a second time, I sought advice from a professional baker's blog and she advised to make sure I obtained a soft and smooth (not runny) dough. But the problem I encountered again was that the dough was runny and sticky and even though I followed her advice to program the machine for "basic" the kneading did not look like regular dough (not soft and smooth). So, what I did was to add flour to obtain a soft and smooth, and not sticky dough. This time the bread rose, but because I ended up adding approximately another cup (or cup and ½) of bread flour, the dough was too large for my machine's capacity so I shaped it and baked it in a large oval casserole dish (11"X8.5"X2.5"). The final rise filled the dish's dimensions completely and once baked (60 min. at 250 deg. F) the bread had mushroomed to twice the volume of the baking dish!  The flavor was very good though.

This is what I am looking to finding out from anyone out there with experience:

If I stick to the recipe, should I decrease the liquids, and by how much, in order to obtain a soft and smooth dough? I don't think this is a recipe for a batter chocolate bread.

Or should I just add another 1½ cups of bread flour and later divide the dough in half and bake them in regular sized (8"X4") loaf pans?

I have the feeling that adding the additional flour does tone down the flavor, which I think would be incredibly chocolaty, cinnamony and sweet like sweet bread would be.  This bread reminds me of a cup of hot Mexican chocolate: rich, thick, spicy and sweet. The bread I got the second time around is nice, but not in-your-face rich and spicy.

Thank you and I look forward to reading your advice!

 Gloria H.

Hi    I have just bought a new Tefal bread machine and every time I bake a loaf of any kind of bread the crusts are too hard.  Does anyone have a suggestion as to how to adjust my recipes to make the crusts softer.

A friend of mine has an allergy and she has been baking her own irish soda loaves for a few months. She thinks though that using a breadmachine would save her time and is looking to buy one. She asked me for advice, on using sourdough in the breadmachine (which i would be providing). My first thoughts on this is that it is known to be hard to use sourdough ONLY (no yeast etc) in the breadmachine and that she would be better off doing quickbreads with baking soda.

What are YOUR experiences? I have no breadmachine and prefer to make dough by hand anyways.....

Thanks and greetings

berti

Greetings

I've just bought my first bread machine 3 days ago. My first whole wheat loaf turned out sunk and too dense. During its third rise it went very high almost to the top of the pan, but 20min before baking cycle it began to sink. At the end of the baking it lost more than half its height, and turned out too dense. The resulting loaf was 1/2 the height of the pan.

In my second attempt, I added 30ml more water, 1/2t more salt, and reduced 1T less sugar and 1/2t less dry yeast, and used the basic program (3:00) instead of the WW program (3:40) to avoid over proofing. The result was much better, the dough didn't collapse during proofing, and there was a nice oven spring at the beginning of the baking cycle, but then a few minutes later, it began to sink a little. By the end of baking it lost the height it gained from the oven spring rise. The resulting loaf was 2/3 the height of the pan.

Can someone please tell me why did that happen? and what can I do to keep the oven spring rise from collapsing back to where it was during the baking cycle? Should I use more yeast? more salt? less water? Changing the flour type is not an option, since where I live, there is mainly one type available, and that is AP flour (72% extraction), and I add 10% wheat bran.

We bought "Bread Machine, how to prepare the perfect loaf", by Jennie Shapter, about six years ago at a Barnes & Noble clearance sale. We've never felt the need to buy any other bread machine cookbook since.

My wife and I can't remember when we last bought store bread. We use our bread machine, a Zo, at least once a week. Yvonne has mastered what we call our "every day breads", and sweet, fruited breads we share with family and friends during the holidays. I, most often use the dough cycle only, especially for high hydration breads like caibatta. We both use this favorite cookbook. Initially, we followed it slavishly; today, having learned much over the past decade, its more a guide, but still a source for "first time" efforts. We've baked about a third of the recipes so far, a dozen have become favorites. We host an annual "open house" where we share our homemade wines that have come of age in each year, along with lots of nibbles, to about fifty guests. This year our theme will be wine and bread. Many of the bread recipes will come from "Bread Machine,...".

The author covers basics and fundemental ingredients in approximately thirty pages, and another twenty pages of advanced topics,e.g., "Sourdoughs and Starters", "Adapting Recipes for Use in a Bread Machine" and "Troubleshooting". The balance of the book is devoted to approximately 170 recipes in nine categories: Basic Breads, Speciality Grains, Flatbreads and Pizzas, Sourdoughs and Starter Dough Breads, Savory Breads, Vegetables Breads; Rolls, Buns and Pasteries; Sweet Breads and Yeast Cakes, and TeaBreads and Cakes. Many of the recipes specify ingredients for "Small" (~1 lb.) "Medium" (~1-1/2 lb.) and "Large" (~2 lb.) loaves to accomodate variations among different machines. Published in 2001, it reasonably up-to-date.

We've followed each recipe we've baked precisely (at least the first time) with unvarying success. It's obvious that every recipe has been carefully kitchen tested for results. There are lots of photos of final results, and "how to" where appropriate, but not at the expense of clear, detailed instructions.

I'm not a big fan of cookbooks anymore, or for that matter any "how to" genre. I rely on the internet (or my self) for nearly 100% of all my cooking, baking, brewing, wine making, gardening, woodworking, etc. projects. However, this is one cookbook I'm glad we have; yet I've never seen it mentioned by other bread machine bakers on the baking sites I visit.

The book is out of print, but, as of yesterday, there were eleven copies, new and used, on Amazon. The cheapest was 8 bucks: a bargain, for a fine book.

David

Have just purchased a Morphy Richards Fast Bake bread maker (2Ib),with fantastic results, and now wish to expand my recipe selection by purchasing a recipe book.

Can anyone help with recommending a recipe book that is specific to the machine that I have

Thankyou

Well, here's my first post and I apologize if the question is too repetitive for all the more experienced.  I've just got into baking breads using a bread machine so it's a whole new world of terms, products and ingredients.  A low-carb buttermilk bread recipe calls for 1/2 cup, or 125ml of Vital Wheat Gluten (Gluten de Froment Elastique).  Yesterday I found a specialty shop where I bought, among other ingredients, Gluten Flour, 80% (Farine de Gluten, 80%).  I showed the salesperson what I needed and I was handed the Gluten Flour.  After researching online, I don't think I got what I really needed.  So, my question is:  Will Gluten Flour do the trick, or should I get exactly what the recipe calls for?

Your help would be much appreciate.

Garry

I just received The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook as a gift.  I was looking through it and one of the 100% whole wheat recipes 1.5lb called for 1 tablespoon of SAF yeast.  That seems like a way overkill.  Is this a typo?

I'm new to bread making and have had quite a few failures with a new batch of Fleischmann's yeast, first jar no problems.  I decided to try SAF yeast and from what I've read seems to be really consistant.  The failures I've seen is collapsed french breads and my wheat breads not rising enough, basically bricks.  I have a Panasonic SD-YD250.  Everything is pointing at the yeast.  Am I missing anything else?

I make breads in the oven but my husband likes the bread machine because it's easier.  We have a bread machine recipe book and he always wants to make this particular Russian Black Bread recipe.  But each time I ended up rescuing his bread because the moisture was too low.  I don't do bread machine so I will have to ask those who have a lot of experience making bread in machines. 

Russian Black Bread (medium loaf)

360ml/1.5 C water

30ml/2 T sunflower oil

40ml/ 2.5 T molasses

140g/ 1.25 C rye flour

85g/ 3/4 C wholemeal bread flour

250g/ 2.25 C unbleached white bread flour

40g/ 3 T oat bran

75g/ 3/4 C dried breadcrumbs

22ml/ 1.5 T cocoa powder

40ml/ 2.5 T instant coffee granules

7.5ml/ 1.5 tsp caraway seeds

7.5ml/ 1.5 tsp salt

7.5ml/ 1.5 tsp dried yeast

The ingredients go in the bread pan in different orders than our machine manual.  But the book also says we should follow our manual if the orders are different. 

Each time my husband tried each time he failed.  We let the machine knead for 5 - 10 minutes but the "dough" would turn solid; it was just turning  around and around and I wouldn't call it kneading.  I always end up taking the ingredients out and mix it in my Kitchen Center with extra water so he would have a loaf of bread.  I don't know why, I made Russian Black Bread (using a different recipe) all the time so it's not that he didn't get to eat it.  But he seems to have problems letting this recipe go.  My first bread machine actually died after one of his attempts in making the very same bread.  I bought him two other bread machines and we still have the same problem.  Last week he wanted to try again so I asked him to add an extra 0.5 C of water.  It sort of turned out but I wouldn't call it a good loaf.  I cannot come up with any other conclusions but something is off with this recipe. 

What do you think?