Bread is a tough thing to experiment with; all that kneading and rising and waiting and waiting some more. I hate kneading, partly because I got confused between wedging clay and kneading bread; one you want to put air in, one you want to get air out. Art school broke me for bread making.

Enter the bread machine. It handles the kneading and the rising and the punchdowns. One of the reasons that people stop using the bread makers they buy is that the recipes included in the box are mediocre at best. The cookbooks I’ve looked at are mostly filled with fancy things that sound better than they turn out.

I finally found a simple recipe online at All Recipes that has finally provided something close to the perfect loaf of sandwich bread. On the odds that it’s a fluke, I’ll have to replicate the experiement tomorrow, with slightly less yeast as it rose just a bit much.

I did find that I do much prefer measuring flour and other dry goods by weight rather than cups and spoons.

The modified version of the recipe that I’m using follows.

• 315 mL warm water (110F)
• 36 gm white sugar
• 8-8.5 gm active yeast
• 80 mL vegetable oil
• 550 gm white, all purpose flour
• 8 gm salt

Yes, the temperature is in Fahrenheit; that’s what my digital meat thermometer displays by default, so that’s what I measure kitchen temps in for meat, etc.

Anyhow, bread machine recipes tend to be written to target the really lazy, put it all in a pan and magic bread shows up when you get up in the morning. They tell you to put the yeast on the top of the dry ingredients, so it doesn’t rise quite the same way.

I’ve taken some liberties with that, and I mix the yeast, sugar, and water in the pan first, stir it up a bit, and let it sit while I measure out the flour and the rest of the ingredients. The 10 minutes or so that it site there, is yeast party time. Throw the rest of the dry ingredients in, with the salt right on top so we don’t kill off the yeast prematurely.

Set it on Basic mode, light crust, and 2.0 lb loaf, and ignore it for a bit.

Once it has completed the initial mixing and kneading, I threw in a bit of fresh chopped rosemary, dry basil, and misc herbs, and about a clove of chopped garlic. After it had finished kneading, and had done the first punch-down on automatic, I pulled the mixers from under the dough ball with just under 2 hours left on the timer.

I then did a punchdown manually 20 minutes later, as the mixers weren’t going to do a damn thing now. Without the big mixing paddles in there, the bottom of the loaf is a whole lot less ugly when all is said and done.