Bread making machines

Hallo Snowbaby. I'm a great fan of home made bread and I have a Panasonic too - it's the best. I suggest using the French 6 hour bake setting using this flour and best butter:
http://www.wessexmill.co.uk/acatalog/frenchbreadflour.html ( available on Amazon)
Jenny

see #263 above

 

Does flour brands really make a difference then?

 

I also have a Panasonic and have found measuring out ingredients has to be very precise. If you want lighter bread try adding 10 or 20 ml more water or adding a little more yeast. It's a case of trial and error but you will get there. I'm now using locally produced flour (Laxey Mills) and yes it makes a big difference, I also had to adjust yeast and water for this. Supermarket home brands tend to be lacking but I've used Allinson's in the past which is better.

 

"Flour improver"? My family is allergic to that, which is why we make our own bread They have no difficult eating French bread, but the improvers in English bread, which seem to make it last longer before going stale, upset their stomachs.

Yes and no. We use standar Tesco's Strong Brown flour, just fine, but we think the flavour of say Allinson flour is better. But it makes no difference as to whether we get a decent looking loaf out of our breadmaking machine (Panasonic)

Sounds like a lot of trouble to me, and in my case would mean that a loaf never got made!

We've had our Panasonic for 10 years at least. It makes a loaf 3 or 4 times a week - so it doesn't owe us a lot! The pan is rather scratched, so not exactly "non stick" any more, but it soldiers on ...

I stumbled over this review the other day (I was looking at a new Panasonic bread maker as it can also make Jam, in small batches, which I thought might be a means of using up our excess soft fruit). Maybe the Brand of breadmaker is critical?

"You might think that once you had a box on your kitchen counter which can stir ingredients around and then get hot for a while, the results would be largely dependent upon the quality of the ingredients and the ratios they are added in, and that any old machine would do. How wrong you would be (and was I)!

We owned a bread maker a few years ago (can't remember the make now) and while it was a bit of a fun novelty and it certainly made the house smell good, the results were nothing to get excited about really, and despite endless tweaking of measurements to try and improve the slightly dense dry bricks that we kept getting out of it, we ended up just thinking that this was what machine-made bread was like and that you couldn't really beat a good fresh bought loaf. Then after only a few months the bucket lost its non-stickiness and after digging 3 or 4 loaves out in pieces with a wooden spoon, we gave up and threw it away."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RHGH...l=detail-glance&nodeID=11052681&store=kitchen

 

Kristen, Im so glad you posted that lol! I would be willing to make dough in the maker then bake in the oven if that made better bread, BUT oh how I'd prefer to bung in the ingredients, switch it on and leave it to make a loaf for me!

Would you be willing to share your wholemeal recipe please?

My daughter has been plagued with yeast infections, and a friend who also has yeast issues, suggested switching to wholemeal bread as it is lower in yeast (It's all new to me, I am at a point where I will try anything to help my baby girl :( )
But I also thought if I make my own bread, I can control what goes in, and in my mind, there's no added ingredients when it is homemade.

I've ordered a slicing guide too from amazon as I keep butchering my loaves bahaha!

 

@Kristen - I get my flour from Heygates via my local Bakery. I've just ordered their French baguette flour ( from their own French miller ) and it's due in tomorrow. I'll let you know how it turns out. Is this place quite near you?
http://www.heygates.co.uk/
Jenny

 

1.25 teaspoons Yeast
1lb 2oz / 515gm of Strong Brown bread flour
1.5 teaspoons Salt
1.5 tablespoons Sunflower oil
1.5 tablespoons Black Treacle (or 1.5 tablespoons brown sugar)
350ml tepid water

Bake Rapid programme (1h55m)

Around me on three points of a triangle, but it would be stretching the definition of "near"

 

Differants flours will make a lot differants, each flour is made up of differant %'s of milling wheats, when milling wheat are divered to the flour mills there is a contact and each load as a passport which has to have the varity of wheat and other info about the load, if any loads are mixed they don't like it and the load can be rejected the loads have to be pure, so that the millers can then plend differants wheats to get the right flour for that type of bread

There's alot of science to it, if you can get an open day at a flour mill it's a good visit

 

Thanks! I'll give this a go!

 

You could try making bread with baking soda instead of yeast, won't be quite the same but it might help. My Daughter has got the same problem.

 

she's got ongoing tests at the mo, but some have come back confirming it's not yeast infection. I still want to bake my own bread though, given there's basic ingredients go into it, it's got to be better for us than shop bread.

Thanks Zigs, your poor girl, but it's good to know my girl is not alone. She's only 5 and poor thing is miserable. This has been ongoing for nearly 2 years now

 

It's Type 65 = higher in protein/ lower in gluten than UK bread flour. Works out at 37p per lb for the flour. I'll make a loaf and post a piccie soon

Jenny

 

16 KG's of flour. Do you find it 'keeps' ok Jenny?

 

yes, it lives in a large poly box under the stairs in the dark. I only decant a small bag to work with as and when I need it. That will last me 4 months at least,
Jenny

 

Is Cellulose still put into [commercial] white bread?

Then there is the bleaching of white flour ...

... and all the (good?) stuff that is now missing from flour

I think the rot started when we changed from stone-ground to roller-milled, that allowed separating the germ, which makes the flour go rancid, but also meant that lots of the vitamins etc. went too ... some are put back in Enhanced flour - along with a bunch of other, questionable, stuff (the gas used, formerly, to Bleach the flour has been linked to the increase in Alzheimer's, for example)

Couple that with the incredibly successful Wheat breeding program of the 50's and 60's - I clearly remember when the new Wheat varieties arrived and "overnight" farmers' yields doubled. Since then they have only crept up perhaps a further 25% or so, and some of that will be agronomy - applying just the right amount of fertiliser, and killing competing Bugs and Weeds. The breeding to increase yield resulted in make the Wheat plant shorter - so it could spend more time growing a seed head, rather than a tall plant - and increasing the size of the "head". To achieve that Wheat was cross-bred with other grasses, and probably some of the nutritional aspects, that human guts have acclimatised to for millennia, were lost / changed

My wife's family have, fairly widespread within her extended family, "gut problems", doctors pigeon-holed it under "irritable bowel syndrome ". They started off moving to Gluten free, assuming allergy/Celiac, and then discovered that they could eat certain types of bread - French bread particularly caused them no problem at all, and nor (as we have since discovered) does home baked bread. Current thinking is that the problem is with the "improvers" in the flour used to make commercial bread. French bread, from the bakery, is stale within 24 hours, so clearly doesn't have some of the stuff that is in UK bread.

I don't know whether the flour that the French use, for their bread, doesn't keep - like old fashioned flour? but if that is the case it would explain a lot, as they will be using proper "whole grain" flour (which certainly doesn't keep). Perhaps we should question why bugs etc. don't eat flour left in the pantry for decades??

Maybe I should get a mill and buy some old fashioned Wheat varieties and mill it myself? or grow my own Wheat? I wonder how much space I would need to grow enough wheat for the flour we use in a year?