Make the most of your breadmaker
So, you want to make great bread, but you're not quite ready to let go of the breadmaking machine just yet? Can artisan baking and the breadmaker be reconciled? To some extent, yes. You sacrifice control for convenience when you use a breadmaker, but it is possible to make some compromises.
What's wrong with breadmakers anyway?
Breadmakers look after the kneading, fermentation, shaping, proving, and baking of a loaf. The kneading and baking parts work just fine, and to be honest the shaping stage isn't the most important for the amateur baker, assuming you taste your bread with your mouth rather than your eyes. The problem is with the fermentation stage.
Breadmaker recipes usually rely on sugar to make the yeast work quickly. Even worse, the breadmaker itself maintains the dough in a warm environment to ensure that it rises sufficiently within the fixed time before the baking phase. As you will understand if you've been paying attention to the other pages on this site, speed is the enemy of flavour in bread. Slow fermentation at room temperature - or even colder - is the key to great tasting, artisan quality bread.
So what can we do to improve our bread without sacrificing the convenience of the breadmaker? Here are some guidelines - remember that every machine is different, so be prepared to experiment and tweak these ideas to fit in with your own schedule and taste.
- Omit the sugar from the recipe unless you are making a sweetened/enriched bread.
- Only use about half the yeast given in the recipe.
- Set the machine to a "knead only" cycle or turn it off when the kneading is finished.
- Put the kneaded dough in a bowl, covered with lightly oiled clingfilm, and refrigerate overnight.
- If you want to bake the bread in your bread machine, roll the cold dough into a sausage shape and put it back into the tin but don't put the mixing paddle in, avoiding that horrible hole in the bottom of the loaf. Set the machine to one of the shorter cycles to allow time for a final rise before baking.
- Alternatively, put the dough in a greased loaf tin, cover and allow to rise in a warm place until it has doubled in height, then bake it in a hot oven, (around 220°C, 425°F, gas mark 7) for about 30 minutes. There is no danger of the bread collapsing after the first ten minutes in the oven, so have a look to check how cooked it is every so often. Remember you will probably have to try a few variations before you get it right, so do persevere.