There are more bread machines in attics, basements and storage closets than any other kind of unused kitchen appliance. Breadmakers disappoint. And for no good reason if the marketers had been candid about the limitations of the machine. It all comes down to the little stirring bar (which has to be small because it stays in the loaf until baking is complete).
I can imagine the design engineers telling front office, “This little stirring bar doesn't mix worth a damn but if you premix the dry ingredients, it does an acceptable job. The instruction book should recommend premixing.”
The marketing gurus would have responded, “You've got to be kidding! There's no way we are going to tell the customer she can't just throw everything in and press START. But thanks for the heads-up. We'll include a packet or two of premixed dry ingredients so the first loaves will be successful. That way the customer will give glowing reports to friends before she discovers she can’t make a satisfactory wholewheat loaf (the main reason for buying the machine in the first place).”
If you have any doubts about the inadequacy of the little stirring bar, take a look at the large counter-rotating hoops of a dough mixing machine. If that little stirring bar does a good job, then those dough mixing engineers really got carried away.
In fact, not only is the stirring bar inadequate, it uses its time poorly – for much of the breadmaker mixing cycle it does no mixing. The dough ball just rides on the stirring bar, whirling round and round – if vertigo were beneficial this would make a fine loaf of bread.
So what is involved in premixing? Not much. Instead of measuring the dry ingredients into the breadmaker pan, put them into a plastic bag (2 litre or 2 quart freezer bags are about right). When all the dry ingredients are in, twist the top of the bag, trapping enough air so that the dry ingredients occupy less than half the space in the bag. Now shake. After ten seconds you will have done more mixing than the bread machine does in 30 minutes. Shake another ten seconds just to be thorough. Pour the contents of the bag into the breadmaker (the liquid ingredients go in first). This premixing trick adds about one minute to your bread making time.
Premixing dry ingredients is the single most important step to success with bread machines but there are other ways in which the limitations of this machine affect breadmaking.
Consistent measuring is a necessity. Traditional breadmakers developed a feel for the right balance of flour, moisture and butter (or oil). They could throw together ingredients without measuring and then adjust as needed. Thorough kneading assured good mixing of added ingredients.
It stands to reason that if ingredients that go in at the start are poorly mixed by the little stirring bar, then ingredients added part way through the mixing cycle are going to get mixed scarcely at all. The correct balance of ingredients has to go in at the start with no adjusting part way through the process.
So measuring is important. This doesn't mean you can't make recipe adjustments and try things. You can adjust the recipe – you just can't adjust on the fly. Once you press START you are committed. In fact most recipes will have to be adjusted, if only because you measure differently than the person who developed the recipe. It doesn't matter whether you pack the flour or leave it loose as long as you are consistent and adjust your recipe amounts until you are making perfect loaves.
Also, each bread machine is a little different (even machines from the same manufacturer). Some recipe adjustment may be necessary to get the best from your machine.
And some recipes adapt poorly to bread machines.
Kneading increases the ability of gluten to contain the gases that make bread rise. Since bread machines knead poorly, most recipes call for added gluten. This ingredient has a bad name because of what it does to people with celiac disease but for most of us it is just a benign protein with some of the properties of bubble gum. If you are content to make white bread, you may not need to add gluten. But as soon as you add wholewheat flour to your recipe, gluten flour is necessary – and in my experience, you need more gluten than the typical bread machine recipe suggests.
If you premix and add gluten and are still making unsatisfactory loaves, the problem may be with your flour. Try flour from different sources. In general, the finer the grind the better which usually means that stoneground is best. But there is an art to grinding flour and the type of grinder may be less important than the way it is used. Variables include one pass or two, closeness of the grinding elements, speed with which the flour goes through the grinder (slower is better but if the flour passes through the grinder so slowly that it overheats, that will not be good). None of this is under your control, of course, but you should be aware that flour from different sources can be quite different, even if the claims on the package make them sound the same.
When I started using a bread machine I followed instructions like putting little squares of butter in the four corners on top of the flour; and putting the dry yeast in the middle in a little depression in the flour. It took me a while to realize that the little stirring bar was not the little engine that could. At this point I started to premix both wet and dry ingredients.
So how do you premix butter and skim milk? I was aided in figuring this out by a distant memory of my grandmother using a separator to make whole milk into cream and skim milk. The cream went into a churn and became butter and a thin liquid called buttermilk. In other words, whole milk is skim milk plus butter with a little buttermilk thrown in for good measure. So I use homogenized milk instead of butter and skim milk. If I wanted a greater proportion of “butter” I would add some coffee cream to the milk.
In the beginning of my premix experiments, I added the salt and sugar to the milk and stirred by hand until dissolved. After a while I thought it might be simpler to add the dry salt and sugar to the dry ingredient premix and that worked just as well. Likewise, the dry yeast, after a while, went in with the dry ingredient premix and that worked just as well as keeping the yeast separate (perhaps a little better).
Following is a simple reliable recipe for a 2 lb loaf pan:
¼ cup gluten (sometimes called gluten flour)
1 ¾ cups hard white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (or graham flour or flour from any of the primitive wheats like emmer)
1 tsp salt (or slightly less)
¼ cup sugar (or slightly less)
2 tsp yeast (or slightly more)
1 3/8 cups (325 mls) whole milk
If the premix bag is a little bigger than the bread machine pan you can use the pan to hold the bag with the top of the bag folded down over the edges of the pan.
For dry ingredients I use the little plastic measuring cups which double as scoops – I use the 1 cup and ¼ cup sizes. I start with the ¼ cup of gluten and dump it into the 1 cup which I then fill with white flour giving ¾ cup white plus ¼ cup gluten.
When the dry ingredients are all in, lift the bag out of the pan. Pour the milk into the pan. Now inflate the bag, twist the top until you have a small balloon and shake for 20 seconds – side to side, up and down, front to back, rotating the bag so the flour doesn’t know which side is up.
Flour in pan, pan in machine, press START.
Watch it closely the first time you make it. If it rises too high and is pressing against the little window at the top of the machine at the beginning of the baking cycle, pull the plug. It won’t cook properly. Either throw the dough in the compost or put it in a bread pan and let it rise again and bake it the old fashioned way. Now adjust the recipe. Small adjustments can be made by using slightly less yeast or gluten. For a large adjustment, reduce all ingredients proportionally.
Some bread machines stop part way through the mixing cycle to allow you to add raisins, cranberries, nuts etc. You can guess how well that works. If these things are added, instead, to the dry ingredient premix, they get individually coated with flour and stay distributed uniformly throughout the loaf.
To make Raisin Bread, add 1 cup of raisins to the above recipe and increase the milk by 1 or 2 tablespoons. Put the raisins in with the dry ingredients (break up clumps of raisins) and the raisins, when shaken, will be evenly distributed and coated with flour.