My First Attempt at Making Bread in the Bread Machine

My mother was recently downsizing her belongings, and gave me her Kenmore Bread Machine. Today, I'm posting about my first try at using the bread machine.

I had a couple of bananas which were turning a little too brown for my wife to eat, so I put them in the freezer to use in making smoothies. But, since I now had a bread machine, I decided to try making some Banana Bread. As you'll see, I'm not really one to "follow the recipe" when cooking. I almost always add, remove or change something. I like to experiment and make each recipe a little more personal.

My apologies for not taking a photo of all the ingredients I used to make this first bread, and also for not taking photos of the finished product until my wife & I had already eaten several slices. Being a photographer, you'd think I would have been more on top of that. Hopefully I'll get a better memory in the future.

I made a modified version of the Banana Bread Recipe from:

http://www.bread-machine-recipes.com/recipes/banana_bread.html

I used:

Ingredients:

---------------------------------------------------- 1 1/2 cup bread flour 1 1/2 cup wheat flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 md ripe bananas (previously frozen) 1/4 cup honey 1/4 cup warm water 1 egg 1/4 cup apple sauce (I always use apple sauce instead of oil when making cakes, so I thought I'd try the same thing on the bread) 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/4 cup rolled oats (My wife is not a big fan of nuts in her bread, so I thought the oats might add a little nuttiness without the actual nuts. In hind-site, I should have added them later in the process so they held together better.) 1 package yeast

Cooking Directions:

I put all wet ingredients in the cooking pan except the water. Then added all dry ingredients with the yeast being added last. Then added the warm water on top of the yeast. I let this stand for 5 minutes before turning on the bread maker. I used the standard setting for fruit and nut breads with the crust brownness set to medium. Total precessing/cooking time was 3hrs 35mins.

My Impression of the resulting bread:

The bread came out spongy, but a bit dry to my taste. The crust also seemed a bit too crusty to me. It also didn't have a very strong banana flavor.

I talked to my mom about this, and she said she always set her crust brownness to light, because to her, even the medium setting always made it too firm. So, I'll be taking mom's advice, and use the "light" crust setting from now on.

And perhaps, using another banana would give it more banana flavor, but then again, I'm not sure what that would do to the consistency of the finished loaf.

Happy Baking, and I'd love to have some feedback, at least to know if anyone is reading my blog. Until tomorrow,

Jerry