best bread from a bread machine

By gwen -

I've found baking with my bread machine -- I have this one -- to be a lot harder than I anticipated. For me, it's harder to get bread right using the machine than using the traditional way, especially if you want to make anything except plain white bread. 

Challah and sourdough are non-starters (haha look at my sourdough joke there). My mix-ins never distribute right, and I've never had any success at all with rye or whole wheat or any kind of whole grain. The moment you sub in any other kind of flour, it all goes to hell and I wind up with an extremely dense, totally inedible doorstop. Also a lot of bread machine recipes use milk powder, which I never have and never can remember to buy. 

This King Arthur recipe, with slight tweaks below, is the best one I've found and reliably produces solidly A-/B+ bread. The only mishap I've had is that once, on a really hot day, making the large loaf (which I'd made before just fine!!) created a huge rise that spilled out of the top of the machine, ruined the bread, and was impossible to clean. 

Am I just bad at bread machines and should stick to my cousin's trusty challah recipe forever? Maybe someday I will have an oven that bakes at a consistent temperature and doesn't heat up the entire house, so baking in the summer won't seem impossible...

Ingredients for a small (1-pound) loaf:

  • 2/3 cup (152g) lukewarm water
  • 1/4 cup (57g) lukewarm milk
  • 2 tablespoons (28g) butter
  • 2 1/2 cups (300g) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
  • 4 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 1 heaping teaspoon (8g) table salt
  • 1 NOT-heaping teaspoon active dry yeast or instant yeast

Instructions:

Weigh everything.

Combine the water and milk and microwave for 20-30 seconds. Check to make sure it's lukewarm.

Put all the ingredients into your machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer.

Program the machine for basic white bread, medium color, and press Start.

When the loaf is done, remove the pan from the machine. After about 5 minutes, turn it out onto a rack to cool.

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