In today’s hectic world, many of us are victims of sacrificing high food quality for convenience. When it comes to bread, it shouldn’t have to be. Breadmaker machines are one of the greatest inventions of the modern kitchen.
I love my bread machine, it make the bread, with less than half of working time using traditional methods. There are some things they have left out of the recipe booklet, though. The moisture content of flour can vary depending on the age & the environment, and no matter how strictly you follow the recipe, sometimes the bread doesn’t come out to perfection. There are two components, we can help to turn the bread out better.
Gluten is grain protein and not all flours have the same protein content. Bread flour has a much higher protein content than all-purpose flour and cake flour has even less. Bread flour is more expensive than all purpose flour but both work fine for making bread, you just need to supplement the gluten content. So instead of buying all the different kinds of flour for every thing you do, why not buy all purpose flour and add wheat gluten when you are making bread. It’s not very expensive and you only need to use a tiny amount, just two teaspoons per a loaf will do the trick, so a single can will last you a long time.
When you decide to add wheat gluten to your bread maker, you will get the very best results adding it to the pan with the flour. The manufacturer of my bread maker machine recommends adding the water before flour so I go and add the wheat gluten straight after the flour gos in as to keep it away from the water.
The next secret ingredient is Dough Conditioner. Their are lots of commercial bread improver’s which have slightly different ingredients- a combination of wheat gluten, yeast and other chemicals like ascorbic acid(Vitamin C), ammonium chloride, DATEM, different salts of calcium, and maybe some soy.
It is a common problem with bread maker machines that have vertical pans to have a lighter crumb at the top of the loaf and a denser crumb at the bottom. Dough conditioners are here to help solve this problem by strengthening the texture and giving the bread a more consistent rise, leading to a more consistent crumb.
As in the case of wheat gluten, you do not have much. In fact, very few. For 1 1 / 2 pound of bread, I think it is only a teaspoon 1 / 4 of dough softeners enough to give me good results.
Either wheat gluten or dough conditioning, you want to review the proposals on the package for the proposed amounts. With bread improvers, different brands give different results.
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