I am making whole wheat bread using my mother's recipe. She has used this recipe since the mid-1980s, and I am using similar equipment. She has been at my house - as recent as two weeks ago - and we have made bread using my ingredients with her recipe and it has come out perfectly. But when I make it, everything seems fine until I take the bread out of the oven after baking and I see that it collapsed.

Here is how it goes (I weighed all ingredients before putting them in and converted to grams below when I used ounces):

• 1600 g whole wheat freshly ground into flour (ground by me immediately before making the bread)
• 4.5 oz lard, softened (127 g)
• 2/3 cup white sugar (133 g)
• 40 oz water, room temperature - drinking water from grocery store that I use for my artisan bread since our water has chlorine (1134 g)
• 1.25 oz (3T) Fleishman's active dry yeast (35 g)
• 80 g Morton's kosher salt (2% of weight of whole wheat flour)
• 200 g King Arthur's bread flour

I combined the water sugar and yeast in the Bosch and let the yeast soften while I prepared other ingredients. I added ~8 cups of the whole wheat flour and the remaining ingredients except the bread flour. I turned on the machine and added the additional flour until the dough started to form like it is supposed to. I kneaded the dough for 10 minutes on setting #3 (of 4 settings - my Bosch was bought new about a year ago and they say to knead dough on setting 2 or 3).

I put the bread directly into 5 loaf pans (this is what my mother does and swears she has done for years - no first rising - and she has done this at my house and it works). I let it rise in an oven with hot water in a pan on the bottom shelf and the light on for about 2 hours (oven temp showed 105 degrees when I took the bread out and began to heat the oven). The bread had risen nicely to about 1" above the top of the bread pans and was rounded and had good shape. I heated the oven to 450F and then put the bread in and reduced the temperature to 350F and set the time for 40 minutes. I literally sat on the floor in front of the oven to see if it would rise or collapse becuase I've had this collapsing thing happen before. After five minutes, the bread was 1 1/2" to 2" above the pans, so nice oven spring.

I went for a walk and my husband took the bread out when the timer rang. When I got home, I saw that every loaf had collapsed in the center so the edges are less than 1" above the edge of the pan and the center is lower than the sides. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Last week I made the same recipe using olive oil (instead of lard) and 2T yeast instead of 3T. I thought perhaps I hadn't used enough yeast, but obviously using more yeast wasn't the problem as I got the same result.

The dough feels nice - has good texture and gluten development and shapes well. If the yeast wasn't working, I would think that would be obvious because the dough would not feel right.

I mention the yeast, though, because I am using Fleishman's Active Dry yeast vs Saf Instant yeast. The expiration on the lid of the yeast (in a jar) is June 2013, and it has been refrigerated since it was opened. I've won big prizes at the state fair using other recipes with this same yeast, and generally I use 2 1/4 tsp (equiv. 1 pkg) for the first loaf and about 1 tsp for every additional loaf. I always proofed the dough, though. When my mother came to visit in March, we made bread with my ingredients and that is when I learned that she didn't ever proof her dough.

I am so TIRED of making this recipe and not having it work for one reason or another. I make beautiful Tartine bread by hand (so I know what dough should feel like), but my family goes through a lot of sandwich bread and it's nice to use the Bosch and make five loaves at once.

Two pictures: One of the loaf I made today still in the pan, and one of a slice of bread from last week's batch.