This is a lovely group for a newbie like me. I'm finding that computers
are even more complex and interesting than bread recipes, though their
contents sometimes lack taste. :^)
Thanks to Bob, Mary, and Laura for the excellent help and suggestions in
the Hitachi dialogue. We tried the works and found that the problem is,
in fact, in the machine; and is an unfortunately all too common one with
Hitachis. It looks like there is a problem or two with the temperature
controls for the rising cycles. The store where we bought our two
ill-starred machines has had more than 150 of them returned for this very
reason.
We have not replaced our Hitachi because despite the inferior support
from the company, it is still the strongest and most useful machine
currently available in our area. We miss it! We got very used to having a
choice of 5 or 6 flavours of bread available. There is lots of new
competition appearing on the market now, and we're checking out every one
that appears.
I have to confess that we rarely, if ever, went exactly by any recipe.
We like whole grain breads without any white flour added, so I modified
all the recipes accordingly. It wasn't as hard to do as I'd expected,
and until the machine crashed we had little trouble getting light,
full-sized loafs (1 and 1/2 lb. size).
One thing I learned from Fleishmann's bread line might be of interest.
The recipes in most bread books are written for U.S. types of flour, and
don't work for Canadian flours.(So one way or another, I had to change my
recipes!) We'd learned years ago that we could use Robin Hood Whole Wheat
Flour in many white-flour recipes in a one-to-one exchange, while other
flours we tried gave us the familiar toughened-rock effect. With bread
recipes, this was very good to know, since we got very light loaves using
no bread flour at all. No, we have no connection with Robin Hood--we're
just fans of light whole grain breads.
And we second Marie's request to Laura: beg, plead, can we have your
orange-cinnamon rolls and icing recipe?
Thanks again for all the good info.
>From Janet; with help from the Amazing Gord, who not only understands
cooking, he understands Machine Innards.