Recently I received a great tip in response to my bread machine pizza dough recipe from Karen B.   I always make enough for two pizzas–then cut the dough ball in half, use one half, stuff the other into a plastic baggie, and freeze it. When I want to make pizza again I take the dough out of the freezer the night before and move it to the fridge. Then the day of I take the dough out of the fridge around 1 p.m., let it sit in a warm place all afternoon, and then make pizza in the evening as per usual.

David M. had another solution to add to Bread Troubleshooting – Bread That Rises and Then Falls Revised. My understanding is the Big Valley is usually caused by too much, or too rapid of a rise. The expanding CO2 from the yeast overwhelms the glutens ability to stretch (rise) and contain it. Note most all of your solutions are aimed at slowing yeast activity. Limiting food (sugar, qty/quality of yeast) or increasing salt which inhibits yeast or the quality (gluten) of the flour. One other thing I have tried with success in addition to those mentioned is adding, or adding more gluten. A couple teaspoons is usually enough for a 1.5# loaf.

In my flour for the bread machine post I show a photo of how we store bread flour that we buy in bulk from Costco.  Cheri asked where we get the five gallon buckets.  My significant other makes mead, so one of our buckets was originally a honey container…I asked my in-house winemaker where a person could get more of those buckets. He said, “US Plastics is a great place to buy all kinds of buckets, and other plastic containers. These white 5-gallon buckets meet FDA requirements and are $4.26 + $1.36 for the lid. Don’t know about shipping though.”

Laura found a name for the weird looking loaves of bread that happen when a one or one and a half pound loaf is made in a two pound machine.  (This happened was on my review of Classic Hearth Hawaiian Bread mix.)  Long live the hippo loaf!!  The flavor is really good, but the second loaf we tried just seemed to have issues. The bread is rising more on one side of the machine than the other and we aren’t sure if it’s the arrangement of the heating coils, or the kneading paddles or what. The bread tastes good but this last loaf looks a bit like a hippo…big rear, and smaller head!

My raspberry bread recipe for the bread machine made a great tasting loaf of bread.  It was also a hippo loaf.

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Hawaiian Bread
¾ cup pineapple juice
1 egg
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 ½ Tablespoons sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
3 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons milk
1 ½ teaspoons yeast

This makes a two pound loaf. Follow the instructions that came with your bread machine in terms of which ingredients to put in the bread machine first.  Make sure you check on the dough after five or ten  minutes of kneading.  Just pop the top of the bread machine and see how the dough is doing.  It should be a smooth, round ball.  If it’s too dry add liquid a tablespoon at a time until it looks OK.  If it looks too wet,  add flour a tablespoon at a time until it looks OK.  Most of the time though, the above amounts should be just right.

I made mine with the bread machine set at medium crust.  It came out a little darker than I’d like.  The next time I’m going to use the light crust setting.

We found the crust to be extra flaky and the bread had a cake-like texture.  It was great!

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1. Bread Mix Review – Classic Hearth Hawaiian Bread

As I gazed at this box of bread mix in Walmart, I realized that  I’d never purchased bread mixes for my machine.  Once we were given a few by a friend, but that had been years ago.  I couldn’t even remember how the bread turned out.

Were mixes any good?  Would I like them?  Would I be able to taste the difference?

I decided to try it out.

The bread looked and tasted fine. I thought it was fantastic toasted with peanut butter on it.  The Man of the House like it but said it had a “funny texture.”

Making bread with a bread machine isn’t hard.  I make sandwich bread about once a week.  It takes about 15 minutes including cleanup.  However using a mix was much easier and faster.

The Man of the House and I haven’t done a firm workup on how much it costs to make a loaf of bread.  We buy our flour, yeast, salt and sugar at Costco.  Our rough estimate is that it costs us about fifty cents to make a loaf of bread.  Even if  it’s double that, a mix is much more expensive than making a loaf from scratch.

So this mix gets points for ease of use and bread quality.  The cost is reasonable for a mix, but more expensive than making bread from scratch.

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