Baking temperature of bread machines
I read an article on "Breadopedia" website about the baking temperature of bread machines:
https://breadopedia.com/bread-machine-baking-temperature
It says "Most bread machines bake bread at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The most whole-grain dough will be baked at 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit."
I have five machines here and have definite preference for the baking quality of two of them. I wondered if this was correlated with their baking temp, so I measured their pan temperature 2-3 times in the mid-to-end portion of their whole wheat program using an infrared thermometer, and noted the peak temperature.
The two Panasonics were 312º and 310º, an old Oster was 308º, an Elite Gourmet was 302º, and a Zojirushi was 292º. This is perfectly correlated with my opinion of their baking quality. Not kneading or rising, just the baking. The Panasonics are best, and the Zo the worst.
Since the Zo was an outlier, I looked in the manual for verification, and it says the baking temp of the various programs is 254 - 290ºF.
Obviously, this is nowhere near the 350º stated in the article.
1. Have you ever measured the temp of your machine? If so, what did you see?
2. Many machines have "custom" programmable modes these days. Does anyone make a machine with programmable temperaure?
I would love to have/experience a machine that actually baked at 350ºF.
Hi,
I do quite a bit of baking of 100% whole grain lean sd loaves and you are correct: The temps vary "wildly" ! I have seen them drop to low 300s F
but then during the bake, it swings back to nearly 400F. However, most of the time, the loaf comes out really good. I don't know why...
Here is a sample. Let me know what you like to bake in the bread machine. Thanks!
Those look good. Yes, I don't understand why it comes out good, esp the Zo. The temps are so low. And bake cycles are long to make up for it.
You actually saw 400F? On the pan?
The temps I reported were measured in the mid to end of the bake cycle.
I do mostly whole grains. Today's was this one adapted for bread machine, using Zo CEC20:
Irish Oatmeal Bread by The Redhead Baker
It came out fine, would use dark crust setting next time.
Hi,
I drop a probe held in place by the lid so it is measuring temp in the cavity not in dough of bread.
I like the looks of that oatmeal bread!!
Interesting technique. Even with such high cavity temps, the Zo stilll doesn't brown crusts well ! :(
Yes, it was an easy convert to BM. The oats soak can be done in the Zo preheat, then add everything else before it starts to mix/knead.
I got a tip from a couple of br machine bakers here at tfl.
They mix 1/2 t each of milk powder and whole milk (liquid). Brush it on the top of the loaf before baking it. They also give it a light slash to prevent "holey" spaces just beneath the surface of the top crust.
btw, the temp probe is the type used in bbq - it is attached to a wire and a reader to monitor temps.
That tip is for upper crust browning?
I've tried spritzing some water on the top but that made no difference.
The most consistent browning all around I've experienced is with the old Panasonics. They also both have nice, thick cast aluminum bread pans.
Last night I looked around for machines with programmable temperature, and found one: the Breville Custom Loaf. Problem is, the max temp is 300F and only adjusts lower than that.
There is a KBS model with dual heating elements that is a little bit intriguing. I wonder about the build quality on the cheaper machines, though.
Yes the crust browns. My (older model) Zoji has no upper coil and so I get a golden top with the milk pwdr and milk coating. See picture 12 at the end of this post. Within the recipe description the author includes the milk coating. I usually line the pan with parchment paper and the side and bottom crusts are golden brown.
Also, I use my own loaf pan and the set up is here. Perhaps the pan's position to the coils helps the sides and bottom brown well. If you scroll to the bottom of this post, there is a picture of a browned loaf.
I have sometimes wondered what I'll do if this old Zoji of mine wears out! I do hope there will be a good replacement.
Happy BM baking!
Very interesting, creative solutions there! I never thought of using a different pan. I'll give the milk powder wash a try.
Troglodyte's SD post is epic. So sorry to read (s)he was chased away. Pedantics often do that to creative types.
There's a good Youtube video of a guy taking apart a Zo X20 to replace the belts. I'll find it if you're interested. It's tedious but can be done. Sad to say, Zo's were not made to be user serviced. Besides the knead paddles, the drive belts and paddle drive spindle assemblies are the parts that will eventually need to be replaced. Maybe some capacitors on the electronics pcb afer 20 years too. Other than that, we should be able to keep them running a long time.
Back on pans and temps: I looked at my old Oster today. It produces great crusts. Like the Panasonics, it has a thick cast aluminum breadpan. It also has something I've not seen on other machines: The temperature sensor is on a spring-loaded mechanism and in direct contact with the bread pan. All the others I've seen have the sensor attached to the side panel of the bake chamber.
This opens the door for some experimenting. I have some high-temp ceramic insulators of various thicknesses. The thought is to insert one between the pan and sensor, so the sensor wouldn't see the full temp of the pan. Might be a quick and dirty way of fooling the computer to produce higher bake temps.
Hi,
Your info is very interesting!
Yes please send YT link on home repairs and can you send a link on your ceramic insulator idea? I think though the Zojir temp sensor is not related to the pan.
BTW I picked up the "use your own pan" idea from various tfl users (just a couple from among several posts: here and here).
Here's the link on the X20 belt replacement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4eFC4Sqgc
He also has another one on how NOT to fix a leaky Zoji pan seal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X9PXOiwSjg
No links on the ceramic insulators, it's just material I've worked with in several circumstances. Might have the opposite affect, too... but I like the idea of sensing the pan directly. Yeah, the Zoji's sensor is in the side panel.
Another idea is to spray paint all or part of the outside of the breadpan with high-temp black paint to increase its heat absorption. I read that lighter-colored metallic breadpans run 8-10% cooler than dark-colored ones, and are not recommended for bread baking. Yet all BM breadpans are bare aluminum.
What a great video-amazing resource.
Hope you get a loaf you like off your machines!
Thanks, we'll get there! Except for the typical rough-looking top crust, the Irish Oatmeal Bread adaptation came out excellent. Taste is superb, nice chewy texture.
I'm a designer/builder/tweaker by nature so I'm still sampling the machines out there and getting a feel for their strengths/weaknesses.
Hi Precaud,
One of my Zo's paddle drive spindles is sinking. Do you think I can replace the part(s) of my pan without having to purchase a new one?
Thanks!
Yippee
Hi Yippee,
Looks like bearing and seal is shot. I know Zoji does not offer those parts (really unfortunate), but a third-party vendor might. I'll take a look this evening..
methinks you're in for a whole new breadpan. They way they're built, the spindle seals/bearings are not user-serviceable. This guy explains it very well:
The video was helpful.
I'll take care not to put too dense a dough in for kneading.
I had tried the very thick rye doughs but won't if it means having the machine longer for regular wheat doughs.
enduring baking temps is a lot harder on the spindle ass'y than kneading action. Since you're baking in a different pan now, you're already prolonging it's life.
How did it happen? Precaud says high temps of baking is what is hard on the machine.
after 15 years of service...
Just perusing down this thread when I read about browning the top. I have a current Oster (CKSTBRTW21) with automatic nut dispenser. It's a little plastic container mounted in the lid of the machine with a thin metal trap door that flips open about 5 minutes before kneading ends. I've noticed that when I bake a sufficiently tall loaf, if it gets near that metal door in the lid, it causes the bread to brown more, but only where the metal door is. Since it's off-center, it's blatantly obvious that it's having an effect on one side of the top of the loaf.
I wonder if simply placing a sheet of aluminum foil on top of the dough would cause better browning of the top in general? I'm going to try on my next loaf, probably tomorrow morning. I'll post a new thread if it works, because that'd be awesome!
And agrees with what I've seen - it's primarily heat radiated from hot surfaces that browns the top. Even the color of the pan's nonstick coating has an impact. The best top-browning machines I've seen have no viewing window in the lid.
Covering the top with alum foil will do the opposite. It is essentially insulating the top of the dough.
>>The best top-browning machines I've seen have no viewing window in the lid.<<
Wait, are you saying there's something better than the Zojirushi Virtuoso Plus?
20 minutes to foil-top results!
Yes. Here's an example of what I mean by "consistent browning all around". And this was not a full-size loaf, the crust was a couple inches below the top of the breadpan.
This is from a 28-YO machine with no viewing window, stainless-steel interior, and thick cast breadpan.
Here is a picture of what regularly comes out of Zoji with window.
Remember though, I take out the mixing trough and prop up my own bread loaf pan.
This is 100% fresh ground whole wheat lean sourdough loaf with clas.
Results speak for themselves. I used a (almost) 1/2 Whole Wheat recipe for this test.
I tried to cut a stencil of TEST in the foil but gave up after messing up the "E". As can be seen, the stencil didn't transfer to the bread crust, but I don't think you can deny the extra browning that occurred on top, specifically where the foil was in contact with the bread. I left the foil flat so that's why the top of the dome is the brownest.
What did it look like without the small piece of foil?
Browning shouldn't be much of an issue with the square, tall breadpans with a full-size loaf, when the crust is at or above the top of the breadpan.
I apologize for not providing a 'before' shot, and I knew this concern would arise. I'll have to make another loaf without foil for proper comparison.
Note that I'm not having any issues, I'm just establishing the possibility that metal will absorb and radiate heat better, resulting in browner crust than without.
Technically, the answer to this is a clear 'no', especially a thin, lightweight sheet of shiney metal. If it is having an impact on top crust browning, it would be for some other reason.
This 're-radiate' question has been around for a long time in more ways than just heat. We used to pain over it in room acoustics. Is a particular surface or material an absorber, an insulator, or is it 'collecting' energy and passing it on?
A thin sheet of shiney aluminum foil is a poor absorber/re-radiator, and it doesn't have enough thermal mass to hold much heat. In those respects, it's kinda like a feather in the wind. It IS a decent radiant reflector/insulator, though.
It IS a decent radiant reflector/insulator, though.
At typical bread baking temperatures, almost all heat transfer is via conduction (at the surface) and convection (inside the loaf), not radiant heat. You would only get some radiant heat effect if the loaf were exposed to a glowing heating element, like a broiler coil, or the coals at the bottom of a tandoor.
The comment you quoted was only describing the material, not the application. At crust level and above, the most significant radiant source would be the breadpan interior surface, IF it is highly textured and/or dark-colored.
I wanted to consider myself educated and re-explain the phenomenon of the crust next to the metal trap door browning more in a simpler way; The crust browns less next to the glass window.
However, until somebody can explain why the crust is darker where the aluminum foil was touching it (same as where the pan touches it), I'm simply unconvinced.
I just picked up a WelBilt "The Bread Machine" from Goodwill. I have yet to produce a proper loaf from it, but so far (and I believe partially because of the massive glass lid), the top crust is very much lighter than the rest.
Clearly, a test in my Welbilt is in order.
That will be difficult, since we have nothing to compare it to. The ball's in your court on that one.
Thermally, as long as the air above is hotter than the dough surface, there's nothing that a piece of anything loosely draped over part of the top crust like that will do to raise the temperature underneath it.
The most likely impact is that the foil traps a small amount of moisture that normally escapes through the crust during the bake.
That Webilt machine is a good example of what happens when the marketing department tells the engineers what to do. :) That lid design has kewl-factor but is a thermal disaster...
I see lots of Welbilt machines with vertical loaf pans on the thriftstore shelves around here, and I just leave them there. They're probably reasonably-good for mixing and kneading. But for baking... I'd pass.
...and want to stress that my goal isn't to be right, but to be accurate (being right is icing on the cake, not the cake). I agree with your science but am far from claiming to 'know' things. As a great philosopher once said "Science is but a vessel sailing the vast ocean of truth, it can chart the waters but never touch the ocean floor."
Indeed, I wanted to start a loaf last night in the Welbilt, but the silly rubber gasket has vanished from my household. I searched for hours including emptying all of the various garbage cans into which it might have found its way only to find nothing.
My $13 Welbilt has now set me back $26, after buying a replacement gasket on Amazon. It'll be 5-7 days before it arrives, but I'm going to see this through.
Experimenting is experimenting. Entertaining even if unproductive. A word to your philosopher, though: The "vast ocean of truth" is but an abstraction. It allows us to pretend that an all-encompassing and absolute truth exists. It downplays contextual realities. I guess we could say that it, too, has no thermal mass :)
My trip into "West Bend"-land was in the same vein as your venture. It was a relatively cheap learning experience. Most of the machines' (plural) shortcomings were not fixable by an end-user. There was one notable exception:
I see a bread pan and I want it to turn black
I plan on doing this to one of the TR2200C breadpans in the near future.
.
Methinks we're getting pretty far afield from this threads's topic. Perhaps start another one about Welbilt history?
Hi Tom,
Could you share the recipe for making the topping of the loaf in your avatar? That loaf looks great!
Thanks!
Yippee
Certainly! But first, you have to see the failures.
Here is the winner. The recipe is the last picture in the group. You can ignore the 'water from 1 egg' which is only listed to help calculate hydration.
You must be so proud of yourself!
Thanks for recipe!
Yippee
We have a new winner. Before now the highest baking temp I've measured was 312ºF in a Panasonic SD-YD150. On Monday I picked up a Cuisinart CBK-200 with minor cosmetic damage at the local Goodwill for $8. This model has a reputation for "running hot", so I was glad for the chance to check one out. After verifying it worked properly, I cleaned it thoroughly and made my standard "1st loaf" in it today, basically a 1.5 lb. Italian recipe with 1/2 cup of wheat bran added. And I was surprised to find that it handily beat the Panasonic, both in baking temperature and in taste. The CBK-200 pan topped out at 348º, and was between 332 and 348 for about 20 minutes of its baking cycle. I've made this same recipe in 6 machines recently, and this is easliy the best tasting.
So, 350º bread makers DO exist after all...
One difference I noticed from other machines I have is the duty cycle of the heating element. On another machine I've been experimenting with recently, once warmed up, it goes into a 4-minute pattern, with 1.5 minutes on and 2.5 minutes off. That would make for large swings in the oven temperature. The CBK-200 hs a very short cycle; 10 seconds on, and 20 seconds off.
Now that I'm convinced of the efficacy of the higher baking temps, I plan on experimenting with some of my other machines to see if/what can be done to raise their baking temps. I'll be starting a separate thread in the next day or two with the first results. Fun stuff!
Two days ago I made a rye loaf in the CBK-200 using the Whole Wheat program, and breadpan temps topped out at 388ºF ! So, some programs bake hotter than others.
I've never double-checked to make sure the machine is producing the temp it's supposed to, but my old Breadman Ultimate TR2200C will bake at 375ºF on the "Bake Only" cycle. The manual gives the temps for each cycle:
New life in the Bread Machine forum?
Yeah, that's what the manual sez. I have two TR2200C's, and they both run 40-55º cooler than the programmed (or claimed) temperature. Disappointing, because it's a pretty nice machine otherwise. The max I've measured in any cycle is 326º, and it only got there at the very end.
That's interesting that it doesn't reach the stated temps! Now I'm curious... tomorrow I'll fill the pan with water then set it to Bake Only at it's max temp, and see how hot it gets.
How did you come about having so many bread machines?
There are 2 of us who are new here, but we've been posting on Reddit's bread machine forum, sharing recipes and findings. You can say hello to the other person, Tombreadian, here. :)
Water boils at 212ºF... could be messy... also, steam impacts heat transfer so I don't think it's a good choice for this test. Real bakes are best, or something like white rice. Also, don't fill the pan all the way; use material with weight comparable to a loaf (same thermal mass). And leave 1-2 inches at the top of the breadpan for your IR thermometer to have clear access to the inside of the pan. It's the pan temp that matters most, not the air.
Well if you want to research monkeys you kinda have to get a bunch of monkeys!
BTW, one clue about the TR2200C's heating capability is its heating element draws only 450 watts. That's quite a bit less than the 550-700W of other comparably-sized breadmakers.
I was going to test with a probe thermometer, but mine maxes out at 300ºF.
@RyeSmile, FYI yesterday I baked a loaf in a TR2200C, using a "personal recipe" that ended with a 60-min bake programmed for 355ºF. Here are the actual pan temps during the baking cycle:
I love the fllexibility of the TR2200C - probably the best BM ever made in that respect - but it's baking temps fall far short of the setting. And with only a 450-watt heating element, it takes a long time (40 min) to get there.
I tried using water to measure my bread machine's temp recently and late in my research came across an article (could have been a comment from this very site) which reminded me of the science of boiling. Two things will happen when attempting to measure this way; 1) As the water heats up, it will begin to evaporate, which will bring the temperature of the water down, and 2) The temperature of the water will never exceed 212 degrees F before it all evaporates (or boils) away.
Pretty sure this is how it works. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Though #2 is the more significant.
Yes, water will not be a good medium for temperatures >100 °C (212 °F). You could try using a salt or sand bath (or some other non-flammable medium) to stick the probe into. Your probe also needs to have a high temperature range. My instant read thermometer has a 150 °C (300 °F) upper limit.
is an infrared thermometer, the range is -20 to 371ºC (-4 to 700ºF). Easily the most useful thermometer I have. I get very good results with this one, and recommend it:
https://us.amazon.com/Extech-IRT25-Infrared-Thermometer-12/dp/B06WVBBZ36
Besides accuracy, the advantage of this one is it uses two AA batteries. Most units like this use 9V, which I loathe and no longer will use.
Though they're not sold on Amazon any more, Google shows other vendors have it.