Just Bought a Bread Machine!

[grazhina]

You don't need bread flour to make bread. I made bread for over 30 years using regular all purpose flour.

Yes, the bread flour does make a bit of a difference, but there's no point to paying extra for flour until you've made some loaves with regular flour that turned out well.

Malt makes a difference, potato water and potato flour make a difference, but you don't need them.

Tracy, did you use a recipe that came with your machine? You have to have the correct proportions and put things into the machine in a certain order. I know I once put some ingredients in out of order, and my bread didn't come out quite right. When I use one of my old recipes I have to keep an eye on the machine, or the dough may be too hard or gooey. I made cinnamon rolls the other day, and wasn't as careful as I should have been, and the dough came out a bit hard, so it didn't rise as well.When you're doing it all by hand you can tell if you need more flour or not, with a machine I'll stop it and look and sometimes press on the dough to see if its coming along ok.

[sparklepuppies]

Tracy, did you use a recipe that came with your machine? You have to have the correct proportions and put things into the machine in a certain order. I know I once put some ingredients in out of order, and my bread didn't come out quite right. When I use one of my old recipes I have to keep an eye on the machine, or the dough may be too hard or gooey. I made cinnamon rolls the other day, and wasn't as careful as I should have been, and the dough came out a bit hard, so it didn't rise as well.When you're doing it all by hand you can tell if you need more flour or not, with a machine I'll stop it and look and sometimes press on the dough to see if its coming along ok.

Yep, I used a recipe from the book that came with it. It wasn't the easy traditional bread, because we don't eat white bread, but the wheat only had 4 ingredients. I was super careful and tried to be precise. It probably took me about 10 minutes just to get water, flour, brown sugar and yeast in the machine! I may have been trying too hard.

I'm going to try again this weekend hopefully, if I get time. The mini show is this weekend (yay!), plus Lawson has a conference all 3 days that he has to be taken to and picked up from, so it looks like my weekend is full, as always... sigh...