September 15, 2012 - 6:33pm
Bread Machine Bread Bakes Flat in the Oven
Hello Fellow Bread Bakers,
I just baked a loaf of part wheat part white bread using my bread machine to do the mixing and kneading. Then I took the dough out, punched down the air on a lightly floured board, then placed the shaped dough in a loaf pan to rise. It looked beautiful after about 30 minutes. But as soon as I removed the lightweight towel, the dough sank and did not rise again when I placed it in the oven to bake. What do I need to do differently?
Thanks a bunch,
Kathleen
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Kathleen, I'm sure your dough was overproofed. I never trust the kitchen timer or my eyeballing, but use the poke test to judge the proofing stage. You should poke the dough gently with your finger, and see what happens.
If the dent fills up right away, the bread is not ready for the oven, yet. If it comes a little bit back, but stays a visible indentation, the bread is proofed right. If the indentation stays exactly the same depth, it's probably already overproofed (unless it is a stiffer dough by nature, with a lot of seeds or grains).
You might also consider the amount of yeast, it might be too much.
Karin
Yeah, I second the suggestion that the loaf was overproofed.
However, the loaf should not have had a problem with being proofed for this amount of time unless there was too much yeast in the recipe. What recipe were you using?
A question- when you say you used the bread maker to mix and knead the bread, do you mean that you let it do the full dough cycle, which would include some time spent rising in the bread maker (on my bread maker this takes about 1 hour 40 minutes), or did you just wait until the bread maker had kneaded the dough enough to make it cohesive and then take the dough out? Obviously this makes a difference to the time the dough has spent rising in total.
That's why some of us take baby bread pictures while the steam is still rising off the loaf. Catch it at its best! :)