Bread baking – sixth loaf

English: Baked loaf from Bread Machine (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

OK, after several loaves of collapsed bread made in the Oster bread maker my dad got me, I decided to re-read my recipe, re-read the basic country white bread recipe in the bread machine manual, take my dad’s suggestions into consideration, read the the basic white bread recipe out of the book Breaking Bread with Father Dominic, and found the following issues:

• I was using too much yeast, 2 tablespoons vs. 2 teaspoons
• I was using all-purpose flour
• Reduce flour to 3.5 cups
• Add more honey
• pre-start a pinch of yeast in the warm milk and water mixture while getting all the ingredients together
• don’t add the salt to the liquid (duh)

Here is the new recipe:

• ½ cup warm milk
• ½ cup warm filtered water
• 1.5 tbsp. butter
• ½ tbsp. olive oil
• 1 large egg
• 1.5 tsp. Himalayan salt
• 2 cups Gold brand bread flour
• 1 cup Bob’s Red Mill Spelt flour
• 1/2 cup Organic Gold brand all-purpose flour (to use it up)
• 3.5 cups flour (I can’t find my scale, yet)
• 1 tbsp. organic sugar
• ¾ tbsp. honey
• 2 tsp. bread machine yeast

I mixed the water and the milk, added the honey and a pinch of the yeast, set aside to let yeast start, then per bread machine instructions in the manual, I added all the wet ingredients including the egg and butter, then added the bread flour, Spelt and all-purpose flours on top, made the hole for yeast and added that, put the sugar on top of the yeast and lightly mixed the yeast and a little surrounding flour, sprinkled the salt over the flour dome, selected the basic bread mode, and let her rip.

All went well, and it rose awesome the first rising, so I let it go and kept checking it every so often, and with every rising it formed a perfect dome all the way up to 1 minute before the baking.

I figured all would be fine, so I walked away and came back 5 minutes later, and the dome was flat, and as it kept baking it just continued to collapse in the center. The final bread was very delicious, though, and we ate about a third of it by this posting.

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