Secret Breadmaker Ingredients

April 25, 2009

I love my breadmaker (a.k.a the bread machine, a.k.a. The Great White Wonder Cube!). It makes great bread, with less than half the work. The more I learn about it, the more I use it and the better results I get. The best part of using a breadmaker is you don't have to babysit it. With most recipes, you can set it up before you go to bed, set the timer, and enjoy fresh warm bread for breakfast.

There are a few things they don't tell you in the recipe book that comes with your bread machine, though. The moisture content in flour can vary, depending on age and environment. No matter how rigorously you follow the recipe, sometimes it's just not going to work out like you want it to. There are a few ingredients, we can add to the recipes to ensure that they turn out wonderfully every time.


Vital Wheat Gluten

Gluten is grain protein. Not all flours have the same protein content. Bread flour has a higher protein content than All-purpose flour, for example, while cake flour has less protein content. Bread flour can cost more, sometimes a lot more, than all-purpose flour and most bread maker recipes call for all purpose flour.

Instead of buying several different kinds of flour for every little thing you do, I buy all-purpose flour and then add wheat gluten when making bread to increase the protein content. It's not expensive and you need very little, about two teaspoons per loaf, so a single can of the stuff will last quite a long time.

When adding wheat gluten to a breadmaker recipe, I find I get the best results if I add it to the pan with the flour. The manufacturer of my bread machine recommends adding the water before the flour, so I add the wheat gluten right after I put in the flour, just to keep it away from the water. It just seems to work best for me this way.

If you have gluten allergies, you shouldn't be eating regular wheat bread in the first place. I'm hoping to experiment with gluten free breads in the bread maker, later on.


Dough Conditioner

Second to wheat gluten is commercial dough conditioner. Different conditioners contain different ingredients. Commonly, they are combination of wheat gluten, yeast and chemicals such as ascorbic acid (a form of vitamin C), ammonium chloride, DATEM (an emulsifier), different calcium salts and soy.

It's a common problem with bread makers that have vertical pans to have a lighter crumb at the top of the bread loaf and a denser crumb at the bottom. Dough conditioners help solve this problem by strengthening the texture and giving a more consistent rise, leading to a more consistent crumb.

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