I've not had a good loaf of bread in ages, possibly in more than a year.
The bread has always been tasty, but incredibly heavy: it hasn't risen.
So this week, we were visiting a store for used household goods, and I found this little Toastmaster Bread Box for $10.00; I brought it home. It came with good documentation (a good part of the value), so I read up on it.
Two primary differences from Hitachi: ▪️ It's a much smaller loaf: 2¾ cups of flour rather than 4 cups, and
▪️ There were two differences in the basic recipe for white bread:
🔸 The instructions insisted that the liquid be added first, before the dry ingredients. That's directly contrary to the way I have been doing it. &
🔸 The instructions called for lemon juice in a white bread recipe.
I've been making bread in bread machines for decades, even researching and inventing new recipes. And I've never seen lemon juice in a yeasted bread recipe.
But I tried it, as specified. Well, mostly as specified: I didn't have lemon juice, so I used lime juice.
Wonderfully open, light. Toasts remarkably well. I don't taste the lime in the bread (it was only a teaspoon), but it was really good.
Ingredients: (and apparently the sequence is important):
⅞ cup warm (80ºf, 27c) water
1½ TBSP olive oil
1 tsp lemon (or lime) juice
1½ tsp salt
2 TBSP sugar
1 TBSP powdered milk
2½ cups plain (or bread) flour
1¼ tsp active dry yeast.
Instructions:
• Put everything into the bread machine in this sequence!
• Press "Go".
• Come back in 4 hours when it's done & enjoy your bread.
Also note: Wheat bread:
Update: The 1½ pound loaf of White and Wheat, with 1½ tsp good yeast plus ½ tsp old-and-tired yeast, cooked on the French Bread #6 setting worked wonderfully.
