I have this obscure/old
link and
Yahoo article to thank for revealing the secret of a soft bread machine loaf. Prior to this, all my loafs came out rather dry and became very crumbly and easily disintegrated when sliced the following days. For a while I thought that maybe it was because I was using AP Flour instead of Bread Flour, so maybe with the lower gluten content plus the shorter rise time in the machine, contributed to the crumbly texture. But I was curious, if there was somehow a way to get around this without having to buy bread flour (my husband had just bought me a 25lb bag of AP flour from Costco, following the bread machine purchase :). I tried the tangzhong method, didn't make a big difference. Tried adding egg and milk, no difference to texture, just ended with a yellow eggy bread.
Until, I stumbled upon that link above, which basically uses a kind of
sponge method (to allow extra fermenting time to improve gluten formation and flavor), but was easy enough to execute (dump everything to the machine, and use the delayed baking timer function). And, wow! Not only was the bread soft/fluffy and tasted much better, the crumb stuck to each other proper (did not disintegrate when sliced), and as a bonus, it stayed fluffy at room temperature for days! I added some raisins, and that also worked really well for flavor and color enhancement (bread looks a bit darker, as if it used some wholewheat flour :). Definitely a keeper recipe, that I hope could also help all of you out there trying to obtain a soft bread machine loaf!
