The instruction manual that came with my bread machine contains only a small handful of recipes - one for each mode of operation. There are two 'quick bake' modes which promise fresh bread in around an hour and a half, so I thought I'd try them.
The recipe I tried was supposed to be an oatmeal loaf - using quick cooking oats - but since I had none at the time I thought I'd just use some wholewheat flour instead. It also called for buttermilk, but I always find a mixture of half milk, half natural yogurt to be a good substitute.
Being intended for the North American market, the quantities were all volumetric - a few cups of this and an mug of that. I can't get to grips with these measures for baking because they're so imprecise. The success of a bread recipe depends on the ratio of flour to liquid by mass, and though the density of a liquid at room temperature is relatively constant, flour and dry goods tend to pack very well. In short, you never know how much of your cup of flour is supposed to be flour, and how much is supposed to be air.
I once read somewhere that to get the correct amount of flour into a cup, you need to tip it into the cup, not scoop it out of the bag with the cup. Sod that. Why not just tip it into a bowl sitting on a set of scales.
Anyway, having measured out my cups of this and that, I put the tin in the machine and turned it on. As expected, there wasn't anywhere near enough liquid to even bring the dough together so I opened it up and poured in about another half a cup of milk.
The end result was actually not to bad. It took and hour and a half as promised. The bread, being so milky, was very soft, but it was also very dense because of the reduced proving time. In short, if I came home one day felling like I'd be desperate for a sandwich in about 90 minutes, only to find there was no bread in the house but only 3.5 cups of flour, one cup of quick cooking oats, 1.5 cups (no, make that 2) of yogurty milk,3 tsp of instant yeast, 2 tbsp sugar, 50g butter, 1tsp salt and some vital wheat gluten (which is really unecessary with Canadian All-Purpose Flour) then it would be a life saver. Otherwise, it's probably best to pop out to the convenience store for a sliced white, or to wait the extra couple of hours.
