First failure :(
I bought a new book of bread machine recipes recently and tried a recipe for rye bread. It was a pretty standard looking recipe apart from using warm water. However, during the rise stage the dough blew up to about twice the normal volume, nearly touching the lid and almost spilling over the sides of the tin. When it was finished the top half was just one big hollow beneath the crust, and the bottom half was dense and doughy. I found another almost identical recipe but using cold water and that worked fine.
I am sure the warm water made the yeast go mad, but several recipes in the book say use warm water whereas other similar recipes all use cold.
I am new to the whole bread-making thing so any advice or comments would be appreciated. By the way, I mixed two thirds cold water with one third hot, as advised in the book.
you figured it out in one more try. It took me 7 or more loaves to tweak my honey oatmeal bread recipe so that it would come out consistently. I had flying crusts, I had collapsed tops, I had dough rise and hit the lid, I had all kinds of things happening. For me, the amount of yeast was key. For you, it may be the temperature of the water.
Keep baking and consider each loaf like a mini experiment.
will go a long way to helping you achieve consistent results. Just measure the water temperature eat time you bake and make a note of the temperature and the final result. You'll then have a successful temperature range that you can use as a starting point for new recipes. You might also wan to study the Rule Of 240 to see if that interests you.
I made a note of the rule of 240 on my personal blog: Rule Of 240
Thanks, I'll go out and buy a thermometer. I've already got one in my darkroom but obviously I don't want to use it for cooking after it's been in photographic chemicals!
So far all my successful bread making has used water straight from the tap (rather cold, winter in England) but I'll try using water slightly warmer according to your formula.
For the failure I described above I used 1/3 boiling + 2/3 cold according to something I read somewhere. I think though this was way too hot.
I used to teach photography years to underprivileged inner city children, as I told them, you must get your times and temps perfect in order to get a perfect picture. The same exact concept is true for baking, times and temps, technique and avoiding contamination are all requirements for a stellar outcome.
I used to use tap water but had a lot of failures until I realized that the chemicals used by the city to treat the water was killing the yeast. If the chemical in question was chlorine then I could simply let the water stand in an open vessel for an hour or two to let the very highly volatile chlorine evaporate on its own. I used a blender to quickly evaporated the chlorine if I was in a rush but then my local municipality switched to using Chloramine to sanitize the water. I don't know if chloramine will evaporate at all so I simply switched to filtered water (which I get in bulk so there was no noticeable cost increase to my budget). Since there are also other chemicals and minerals in tap water, and they change over time I realized that filtered water would give me reliable, repeatable results.
I run two thermometers, one in he oven while its reheating, on top of the rack that I'm using. That way I know that the oven is reaching the temp I want, consistently. The second is the probe style thermometer which I poke into the center of the loaf and look for 200 to 211 degrees F (93.3 degrees C 99.4 degrees C), if its not in hat range, then I put it back in until it is. (If the temperature in the center goes above that then its already burned and you'll probably smell the burning).