Until this time. I usually prefer a whole wheat bread, but was also in the mood for something with an extra savory kick. So, I took the bread machine book’s “Parmesan-Pepper” recipe and swapped out 1/2 of the regular bread flour with whole wheat. That’s it — hardly even counts as a deviation.

But as the bread reached the ‘baking’ stage of the process, I got totally paranoid. I peered in to see how it was doing, and it seemed unusually lumpy. I know that wheat flour is generally ‘thirstier’ than regular flour, and I wondered if I ought to have added extra water or oil? It was at this point in the process that I consulted the machine’s instructions and found the helpful tip suggesting that you check in during the kneading cycles to see if your dough needs more water or flour. Ooops. I suppose I should have thought of that earlier…

Oh well. I used a wooden spoon to help fit the dough more evenly in the baking pan & let the machine do its thing. The smell was pretty amazing, so I was hopeful that even if my bread was a little dry & lumpy, it would taste darned good.

And I was pretty much right. Here it is.

Still looks pretty good, right?

The peppery cheesey flavor was more subtle than I expected, and the bread was a little wheatier than I expected (which I liked). But with bread, texture has so much to do with the flavor that the dryness and denseness of the bread definitely detracted. It was at that point that the Little Mister pointed out that bread machine bread almost always seems to be dense — at least whenever we’ve had it made by others or our selves.

A quick google search suggests I’m not the only one to have this issue. Some suggest that you need to use bread machine yeast (I was using Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast, and I suspected this could have been the culprit) and more water (which I also considered, of course). Others get more complicated, suggesting you add extra gluten. This quick list of common bread machine problems seems pretty helpful, and I expect I may find myself consulting this again if I decide to make bread again this year. Otherwise, I’ll probably just forget all about my problems and wind up eating dense, dry bread again next year — and thinking its great anyway, just because I made it myself.