“1. The first rule I broke was the inclusion of dried milk powder. It didn’t seem logical to put water and milk powder when you could just put milk. So I did, and then, since I make a kind of drinkable yoghurt called kefir (another story but ask away), I used that too and found that it worked even better. After all, Ireland where I was living at the time, has long used buttermilk in its soda bread.
If you mess around with the liquids though, you will have to abandon the total convenience of putting all the ingredients in, setting the timer and walking away. It is vital that the dough be not too dry and not too sloppy and so if you havent measured ingredients precisely as per machine instructions, you need to keep the lid open and maybe make adjustments to the mix during the first five minutes. How will you know what is right? Ultimately, an experienced eye coupled with a gentle finger prod. Before that though, its the same instruction as for hand-making bread – when the dough pulls away from the side and providing it isn’t thudding round like a burnt Christmas pudding, then its probably right.
Now if you want the bread to be freshly baked when you get up in the morning, you can at this point switch the machine off, set the timer and it will wake up and knead the dough again at the appropriate hour and be so much the better for it! More kneading means more bubble trapping gluten develops which means a lighter loaf.
2. Yeasts and sourdoughs.
Bread machine manufacturers advise against using fresh yeast and offer no recipe for sourdough starters. In the former case, it is because the fresh yeast may rise too much, spillover and fall on the heater elements, form big bubbles in the top of the loaf which may collapse and generally not form the perfect loaf which a machine is duty-bound to turn out! Even the salt which all recipes include is not there for seasoning but to keep those puffed up yeasts in order! You can break these rules and use either the hyperactive fresh yeast or the slow off the mark sourdough starter. The latter is after all yeast, just naturally occurring and variable rather than the mono-cultural brewers leftover yeast which may be the source of your fresh stuff.
You just need two different tricks. Horses for courses.
For sourdough, run the cycle twice, stopping the machine as near to the baking time (usually the last 60 minutes) as possible and starting it over again. This way the yeasts get twice the time to grow and develop, feeding on the flour itself as well as any sugar you have added. This is what makes sourdough bread so tasty and factory steamed bread so tasteless (near-instant yeast that puffs up the bread in minutes). I won’t go into making sourdough starters here but ask if you want.
3. Become a Slasher
For fresh yeast bread, it is a case of another intervention that rules out leaving the bread to do overnight, you must slash the bread at pretty much the exact right time. Slashing bread, as well as making it look pretty, does two things, it makes sure there are not lots of big bubbles hiding near the top of your loaf ready to mess up your slices in that annoying way. Slashing at the right time. about 30-20 minutes before the actual baking, pricks the bubbles and lets the loaf rise to fill any collapse occasioned. In the case of a denser bread which might be struggling to rise, such as sourdough or a bread using a less gluten-developing flour like rye, the slashing opens up the crust which may have dried a little forming a restrictive skin, and the bread is free to expand again. With these breads slashing can occur earlier, as long as the last kneading cycle has taken place.
Once I managed a restaurant with a wholefood shop on the side and our baker up the road supplied the bread. Not so knowledgeable in those days I described the kind of brick-like dense loaf which I knew would be expected by wholefooders. He couldn’t quite grasp it and so we arranged to visit The Neals Yard bakery in Covent Garden. So little was my interest in the technicalities I regret I stayed outside, but afterward, I asked him if he understood now, having seen their product. He said he did, and that it was on account of they didn’t use their proving racks properly. They didn’t put water in the tray in the bottom that moistens the warm air in which the loaves in their tins do their final rising. Accordingly, a crust formed and restricted the bread from rising. the baker supplied us with his normal offering – big and squeezable and, made from exactly the same dough but stunted by drier proving, a denser “wholefood” loaf. Each loaf had its adherents and both camps, if let in on the secret (in the event say, that one type had run out), refused to believe that the bread was made from the same batch of dough!
A last word on yeast, I also make a drink of fermented tea called Kombucha and I save the yeast at the bottom to add to my bread simply observing the same precaution as for fresh yeast.
To conclude, you can experiment in many ways not even hinted at in your bread-machines manual providing you are prepared to make the odd intervention during the process, get the initial dough mix just right and get slashing near the end, before the baking starts.
There are those who throw up their hands in horror at the idea of a machine making bread, not at all Zen! But I feel that the machine offers a consistent environment, even in the coldest house, in which the variations you experiment with are more easily judged. So far there is no type of bread I have not been able to produce.”
