I am a gadget nut, I really am, I love gadgets and comparing gadgets.  I’m also a former scientist, and these two characteristics combine to help me solve gadget problems.

One gadget I have been comparing since the late 1980s is the bread maker. I like bread makers for a couple of reasons.  First, I think that they are amazing.  Dump in some ingredients, press a button, and you get bread!  Second, many different ones have been manufactured over the decades, and I have found that subtle differences can significantly affect the finished product.  Third, I can acquire machines that were hundreds of dollars new for pennies on the dollar used.  I have purchased many bread makers at thrift stores for less than $10, some as low as $4.99.  Granted, they were often grubby, but a little soap and water easily fixes that problem.  

Over the years, I have tested 30 different bread makers.  Yes, thirty.  I have used high-end brands, such as Zojirushi, Panasonic, and Breville; classic household brands, like Oster, Breadman, Cuisinart, and Regal; and newer value brands, including KBS, Kitchen Arm, and Osipoto.

On my last birthday, my wife gifted me two bread makers she thrifted: one was $4.99, and the other was $10.  I thought they were the perfect gifts, as she put considerable time into finding and cleaning them. My wife isn’t into bread makers, so her efforts were absolutely a gift of love.

Premium brands are great, but let’s face it: a top-of-the-line Zojirushi now sells for $500, and the other high-end brands aren’t much cheaper.  Less expensive brands may not be as durable, but they can also make excellent bread. And let’s not forget those used bargains that can be picked up at thrift stores. Not everyone can drop $400-$500 on a bread maker, but everyone deserves great bread. Getting a reasonably good bread maker at an affordable price can be a reality with a little effort.

In my bread-making travels, I have discovered that bread makers fall into three categories.

1. The first category: breadmakers that reliably make great bread.  They may have a glitch or two when making a new recipe, but those glitches are easy to correct.
2. The second category: bread makers that generally do pretty well, but they have a singular problem, usually underproofing or overproofing. These problems can be corrected with a little experimentation. I most often see this issue in older bread makers, and it may be due to miscalibration over time.  For instance, the baking chamber may heat up a bit more than intended during the proofing period. This is the category I’ll be exploring today.
3. The third category: machines that act oddly but consistently, suggesting they were designed for a different environment.  Perhaps a place where the temperature is different, or the flour is different, or where a different strain of yeast is used.  These machines tend to over proof 2 pounds loaves and under proof 1.5 pound loaves.  I have seen this characteristic across several machines, suggesting that the problem is a programming issue.  These machines can also work properly with ingredient adjustments, but new corrections may be necessary for each bread type and loaf size.  If you make one or two types of bread, then this is no big deal.  However, if you like to make many types of bread, these machines can be a pain. 

The two used machines that my wife found were different models of older Oster bread makers.  One made perfect bread, but the other tended to overproof.  Since the bread makers were a gift, I felt compelled to put on my scientist hat and fix the second machine’s problem.  Since these machines are old and not programmable by customers, I had to use my chemistry knowledge to fix them.  

I thought it would be useful to write about overproofing in general, and then look at how I fixed the overproofing in my old Oster machine that my wife gave me. 

A case of severe overproofing. The bread looked great until the baking process started, then the whole top exploded.

Some easy chemistry.

Gluten is what makes bread chewy, stretchy, and delicious.  Gluten is formed in the process of kneading.  Too little kneading and you will have inadequate gluten; if you knead your bread too much, you can break down the gluten.  It is hard to over-knead bread by hand, but a machine can over-knead dough.

Yeast is a living organism that converts the starches and sugars in bread dough to alcohol (burned off during baking), flavor compounds, and carbon dioxide gas.  

During the fermentation process, yeast grows and divides, releasing carbon dioxide, which is trapped in the bread by the stretchy, elastic gluten.  If the yeast doesn’t grow enough, you will have a low rise. If your gluten is inadequate, it will be unable to contain the carbon dioxide, and you will have large holes in your bread and a collapsed top during baking. A collapsed top can happen if too much yeast produces too much carbon dioxide gas, if the gluten is too weak to contain the gas, or if both occur. 

It is the balance between carbon dioxide production and the strength of the gluten that determines a properly raised bread dough.  Not enough carbon dioxide because of inadequate yeast or too much gluten, and you will have a poorly risen loaf. Too much yeast activity or not enough gluten development will cause your bread to overproof and collapse during baking.  Why does baking cause it to collapse?  The heat makes the carbon dioxide expand; if the gluten is weak, it can’t contain this additional pressure and bursts.

Properly risen bread is dependent on the interplay between yeast and gluten. If you understand this sentence, you can fix your over-proofing issues. 

Let’s look at three levels of “fixes,” from simplest to most complicated.  Every user of a bread maker should implement level-one fixes automatically, as they are good bread-making practices.  The other two levels should be applied in order if level one fails to produce decent, correctly proved loaves.

Please note that every ingredient impacts the rise of a loaf. However, some ingredients, such as sugar and salt, also affect the quality of the bread.  Although these ingredients can be altered, doing so will likely have an adverse impact on the bread and should only be done when simpler options are exhausted. 

Additionally, all-purpose flour has less gluten than bread flour and can lead to overproofing if the recipe calls for bread flour. 

Always explore a new machine by making the recipe for basic white bread in that machine’s manual. If you bake a successful loaf, you know that the machine is working properly.  Recipes from third parties, especially from individuals, may work well in one machine, but not another. However, you can then use your successful basic recipe to decode the differences between the two and get the new recipe to behave. If the basic recipe is overproofing and you are using good practices, then move on to level two, then three.

For me, overproofing is the most common problem that I encounter.  If there is an interest in underproofing solutions, I can write about that in the future. 

Level One Fixes (good practices)

• Check out your ingredients.  Are you using the recommended yeast type? The correct type of flour?  The correct salt type?  Salt inhibits yeast, and large-grain salts are less salty by volume than table salt. Adjust accordingly. 
• Check out the temperature of the ingredients.  They should be at room temperature for consistency. 
• Measure correctly.  This is incredibly important.  I use a food scale to measure my flour, as using volume measurements for flour is notoriously inaccurate. Additionally, I use measuring spoons for low-volume items like salt and yeast and level them off. Some food scales can be inaccurate when weighing items under 10 grams, which is why measuring spoons are better for small quantities. 
• Make sure the dough ball looks good during kneading. I check after a minute or two of kneading. If the dough ball looks too slack, I’ll add 1T of flour and repeat every 30-60 seconds until it looks good. Since I weigh my flour, I usually don’t need to add any, or if I do, only one tablespoon. The converse is also true.  If the dough ball looks dry and ratty, add 1T of water every 30 seconds or so until it is smooth, round, and slightly sticky. 
• Check your room’s temperature.  If it is too hot, your bread may overproof.  Look for obvious problems, like exposing your machine to direct sunlight, which will heat it up. 

Level one quick fix

• If you don’t want to go through the hassle of figuring out why your bread is overproofing, use your bread maker to knead and ferment the dough, but then place the dough in a bread pan for its second rise and bake it in the oven.  Some home bakers do this, but I’m a lazy guy and want a “door-to-door” solution. 

Level two fixes

• Try a different high-quality brand of bread flour.  Bread flours can vary from brand to brand; look for one with higher gluten content. 
• If using bread maker (instant) yeast, try active dry yeast, which is slightly less powerful.
• Try reducing your yeast by ¼ teaspoon.
• Try a commercial dough enhancer. However, dough enhancer ingredients vary by brand.  Some can actually make the dough softer or encourage yeast growth, which can have the opposite effect that you want.
• If your bread maker allows custom programming, reduce your last rise time by 5-minute increments until you achieve an adequate, quality rise. 

Level three fixes

Now it is time to put on your scientist hat.  Let’s learn a little more chemistry.

Professional bakers use a variety of additives to create a perfectly consistent loaf. Some of those additives make the crumb softer, some preserve the bread longer, some help the yeast along, and some help the gluten. Since we are dealing with an overproofing problem, we need to either reduce the power of the yeast or strengthen the gluten so the carbon dioxide bubbles don’t burst during baking (and collapse the top of the bread). 

Here are some additives that can help correct overproofing by strengthening the dough’s gluten.

Vital Wheat Gluten (VWG). VWG is gluten in concentrated form.  If you add this to bread flour, you increase the flour’s gluten content and strengthen the dough. I often start at 2 T per loaf and adjust accordingly. 

Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C).  Vitamin C strengthens disulfide bonds in gluten, making gluten stronger and less likely to burst when baking.  I use a tiny amount of vitamin C powder. My Vitamin C came with a little plastic scoop that is likely less than 1/16 of a teaspoon.  That is the amount that I add.  You can also use vitamin C in the form of lemon juice, about 1 tablespoon per typical loaf. As an aside, using Vitamin C in baking does not increase the bread’s Vitamin C content, as the vitamin is destroyed by heat. 

Calcium Sulfate (Gypsum). Provides calcium ions that strengthen gluten’s bonds. If you are going to use Gypsum, you should only add the tiniest pinch, or 0.1% of flour by weight. If you want to go this route, I would suggest using Calcium Sulfate as part of a bread conditioner product. These products will contain other ingredients, such as VWG, which increase their volume, so it is easy to measure out the “diluted” calcium sulfate. For instance, the instructions may say to use 1 teaspoon of conditioner for every cup of flour. However, conditioners sometimes contain a variety of other enhancers, some that may be used to soften, not strengthen, the dough.  Using them may complicate your discovery.

Potassium Bromate.  This chemical is an oxidizer and works like super Ascorbic Acid, but don’t use it.  Why?  Because only a tiny amount is needed, and if you use more, it can be quite dangerous and possibly even contribute to causing cancer. The amount to add is ridiculously tiny at 1 teaspoon per 800 cups of flour.  Therefore, it is likely that you will over-add this chemical, and that is bad. This chemical is permitted in the US because, when used in proper amounts, it is converted into a harmless compound during baking.  However, the EU and other places have banned it in baking. Potassium Bromate is too dangerous for a home baker to experiment with.

The goal is to find the right balance by using the correct amount of yeast vs gluten.  In this series of experiment I’m using the basic white bread recipe developed for this bread maker. I always follow level one protocols.  

I did come up with a solution, but the process took me several weeks because I was eating most of the bread as I baked it.  If a bread is mildly overproofed, it is still perfectly good bread; it just doesn’t look great.  When conducting any experiment, it is best to change only one variable at a time.  However, my goal was to correct overproofing, not to publish a scientific paper, so I sometimes changed two variables at a time. Not best practice, but it still worked.  Let’s get into it!

Despite doing everything correctly, this initial test loaf rose spectacularly and then collapsed during baking. A case of classic overproofing.

Here is my first attempt at a fix, using vital wheat gluten and a commercial dough conditioner. This loaf is much improved, but I wonder if the gluten is too strong, as the bread didn’t dome.

Here is a slice from that loaf. Not terrible, but note the big air bubble, and there is some minor collapse on top.

The next experiment. I reduced the vital wheat gluten to 1 tablespoon, removed the dough conditioner, and added Ascorbic Acid. This loaf doesn’t look too bad. However, some collapse is likely due to overactive yeast.

The final experiment. This loaf looks good. A decent dome, and it is well risen. All I changed was to make a very small reduction in the yeast.

A decent crumb! I believe our experiment was a success!