Random bread-making tip:
The bread machines I’ve used all had the same 3 problems:
1. The bread came out crumbly. You had to slice it pretty thick to get it to hold together, and even then if sometimes fell apart while you ate it.
2. While mixing, it would kick up flour and sometimes bits of dough. Then later in the baking part of the cycle, anything that had settled on the heating element would start to burn, often setting off the smoke detector.
3. There were always clumps of unmixed ingredients packed into the corners of the mixing bucket.
The solution to all 3 of these turned out to be the same thing: Run the machine twice.
If you run it first on the “bread dough” setting, that gives you a chance to pull the bucket out and wipe down the heating elements, and you can use a wooden tool (not metal, you don’t want to scratch the finish) to dig out anything that got packed in the corners. Just poke those clumps back into the dough, the next kneading cycle will mix them in nicely.
Then, run the machine on the regular bread setting. The extra knead and rise cycles will give your bread a better, less crumbly texture.
Running the machine twice will mean that the yeast eats more of the sugar, so you may want to tinker with the amounts. But I think the improvement to the texture is more than worth it! Not to mention, this means not having to deal with the smoke detector going off!
I’m sure that, somewhere out there, there’s a breadmaker that doesn’t have any of these problems. But I have yet to find it, and all the ones I have tried had the same issues. So, if yours is having problems, try this trick and see if it helps.
Happy baking :)
That’s good advice. We haven’t used ours in a long time, but I’ll remember what you suggest.
I haven’t had much of a problem with the texture of bread out of ours, but I don’t like the machine - it makes a fat, vertical loaf that’s very unwieldy for sandwiches or toasting. I’ve been trying to find a reasonably-priced one that makes a horizontal loaf.