This May Not End Well

 

1. I haven’t made bread in a while, but when I did, I cheated and used a bread machine. One of my favorite recipes was in the instruction book… Cinnamon, raisin, nut bread. The machine sounded like a 57 chevy stripping it’s gears with that mix. Pretty good, toasted with butter.

   Posted by JimS       06/03/2020  at  03:44 PM  



2. Hey, whatever works. Nothing wrong with a bread machine, and they can be really convenient.
   So it’s not cheating. I use a precision scale, a heavy duty stand mixer, a graduated rising bucket, and a precision temperature rising box called a proofer. That’s modern tech, not cheating. I could do it all by eye and by hand, but that’s a heck of a lot of hard work. I’ll take my gizmos, thanks.

   There’s a bread machine somewhere in my mom’s basement, a relic of the early 80s. I bet it still works. It made decent bread, although every loaf looked a bit like a blunt artillery shell, and you always had to pry the stirring lever out of the bottom of the loaf.

   Cinnamon raisin bread can be a bit of a challenge; to get a rich taste you have to spread on a spice paste and then roll the dough up again. The loaf has a hard time holding together with that swirl in it. Tastes great though. Cinnamon is known to have some kind of impact on yeast and gluten too. Too much of it and the bread comes out flat and weak.

   I haven’t tried to adapt any of my bread recipes to bread machines. I’ve heard you shouldn’t use super powerful yeast, and I remember that you have to assemble the ingredients in a certain order. Other than that, the only thing you’d need to do is to properly scale my recipes to fit the volume of your machine. And remember that 1 cup of flour weighs 120gm, and a cup of water weighs a hair over 240gm, and a teaspoon of table salt weighs 6gm.

   Posted by Drew458       06/05/2020  at  12:10 PM  

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