I love bread makers. I use ’em hard and tend to wear them out. (Like many things bread machines are built shitty and cheap… I think most of them get used only rarely.)
Usually I mill my own flour from grain (huzzah!) but sometimes I get lazy. Recently I bought “Honey Wheat Bread And Roll Mix” from Provident Pantry. (A company that’s usually excellent.) I intended it as a shortcut for making bread in my machine.
The instructions had no provision for bread makers. Their usually excellent and informative web site doesn’t even admit that bread makers exist. I called their info hotline and got a well informed young man who almost died when I asked about break machine use. Seriously, he almost crawled out of the phone trying to avoid saying anything about bread machines or their alleged utility for theoretically making bread should such a question arise in some other dimension or hypothetical parallel universe.
Am I missing something? Are bread machines the mark of evil in Mormon philosophy? Is there not one overworked suburban mom in all of Utah who doesn’t have two hours to screw around kneading? Dammit I know they’ve got electricity. Why not **&%$% appliances? (If he’d said, the “stuff we sold you won’t work with a bread machine and don’t even try” that would have been a straightforward and acceptable answer.)
Anyway I just applied the “fuck it… let’s see what happens” approach. I measured the stuff according to hand kneading recipe and dumped it in the machine. Twenty minutes later I came back to hear my machine’s motor making irregular sounds. The bread dough looked just right but the little motor was having trouble mixing the dough? Maybe it’s thicker than usual recipes?
If my bread machine dies I’m gonna’ be bummed out. I don’t buy appliances lightly and they’re not cheap and trendy like they used to be. (Sometimes you can find them used but the supply is dwindling and half the time they’re missing the pan or the little plastic paddle.)
I added more water and it spun freely… making what appeared to be glue. Is this good or bad?
Then I added some flour and the glue turned into wet cement. This can’t be good?
Shit!
Right now the machine is on pause while it goes through a “rise” cycle. I’m not sure where this experiment is going. Could be good bread. Could be a blown motor.
Wish me luck.