- Messages
- 334
- Type of diabetes
- Treatment type
- Diet only
I know this isn't the first time this has been mentioned on here, but I've been cooking this for a while and doing a little bit of experimentation. Some things work and others don't. I thought it might be interesting to share, and learn from each other's successes and failures.
The recipe makes too large a loaf in my 2lb bread maker. It rises until it touches the glass lid, and then that bit shrinks and collapses later in baking. I've thought about reducing the ingredients, but what I've ended up doing is using the bread maker to make dough, transferring it to two lightly (butter) greased bread tins, giving it an hour to rise, and finishing it off (Gas Mark 6 - Google for degrees C or F) for 30 minutes in a pre-heated oven or 35 minutes from cold.
What I'm finding when doing that, though, is it doesn't seem to rise as much as it would in the bread maker. However the oven baked bread has a much nicer, browner crust, and doesn't have the big hole in the bottom from the kneading blade.
It isn't cheap. Ingredients are costing me £3.50 per dough batch, which is either one large loaf or two smaller ones, though still less than half the price of much the same recipe commercially pre-made. I'd ideally like a way to bulk it up a bit, without increasing the more expensive ingredients (the oat fibre, vital wheat gluten and flaxseed meal.) The obvious thing is to try to get some more activity out of the yeast, but adding 50% more yeast and doubling the honey doesn't seem to make any difference in the resulting loaf size. Neither does covering it with cling film and putting it in a pre-warmed (to about 40C) but turned off oven for the rise time.
Maybe there are some cheaper ingredient substitutions as well. I have discovered that flaxseed meal can be bought cheaper as linseed meal, for example. I've also got a big tub of psyllium husks here, that I bought for a different bread recipe, before discovering this one, that didn't need about 18 egg whites. Maybe I can partly or fully substitute that for one of the other ingredients.
One tip I'd highly recommend is to create several batches of dry bread mix (the oat fibre, flaxseed meal, vital wheat gluten, powdered sweetener and xantham gum) and store them in sealed bags or jars. This is by far the messiest part of the exercise, and whether you do it once or ten times, it results in much the same clean-up work. It also means that making the dough or bread is literally water and eggs into the bottom of the bread maker, dough mix on top, salt, honey and butter around the edges, and yeast in the middle. This is totally mess free, apart from the washing up.