Problems With Your Bread?
- Use our suggested recipe. Do not weigh your mix. Each type of bread has a different weight for the same volume (eg 3½ cups of white weighs 500g while wholemeal weighs 520g).
- Make sure that your cup measures are metric.
- Make sure that your water measure is accurate. Too little water and the bread will not rise due to insufficient volume. Too much water and the dough is too heavy for the yeast to work. The tolerance is about 20ml (that’s about 1 tablespoon).
- Make sure that the water is not too hot, particularly in the summer. If in doubt use water from the fridge. Your machine should bring the ingredients up to the optimal operating temperature.
- Make sure that your yeast is not more than 8 weeks old. If you are using sachets of yeast measure them into a teaspoon (they can vary quite significantly in weight)
- Try fluffing the breadmix. We see more problems with breadmix that comes in bags from the mill. Due to storage, they get quite compacted. Put the mix into a storage container. This movement will aerate it sufficiently to help a possible compaction problem.
- Try another setting on the machine eg if you are using a multigrain bake, try the rapid.
KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER:
- The total volume of mix and water is important. Even if you are mixing varieties do not change the total dry measure.
- If you are adding other ingredients such as seeds, grains or fruit, do not add more than 1 cup. Do not add more than 1/3 of a cup of other types of flour such as soya or barley. They affect the volume and water measures.
- Even if you are still “doing what you have always done” something has changed. Go back to the basic recipe.
- If you are still not having success bring in your mix and we will test bake in our machine.
- We will also test bake in your machine in the shop.
These are just our suggestions, that we’ve come up with from selling tonnes of breadmix to thousands of bread making customers. Generally we can solve a customers problem 99% of the time.
