The Breadmachine Project

Welcome to the Breadmachine Project

We love to wake up to the smell of fresh baked bread. We make a loaf every day... well almost every day. Somewhere between 100 to 200 loaves per year, since 1993. On this page we share our favorite recipe. Here is what we a striving for... chewy texture that has whole wheat flavor but not too heavy, lots of nuts and raisins left whole throughout, and a carbo/protein/fat balance in the guidelines of the Zone approach to sports nutrition.

Mark is the baker. He dumps the ingredients into the breadmachine at night. One problem is that measuring everything out takes concentration, which is something lacking at the end of the day. More than once the yeast has been left out. Once no water was added. That created the worst result. A solution that we have adopted is to measure out the ingredients to make 1-2 weeks worth of bread all at one time. We leave out the wet stuff and yeast. The stuff for each loaf goes into a box awaiting its time to grow and bake.

Another problem with this "dump everything in at once" approach is that the raisins and walnuts often get smashed up beyond recognition. To do this recipe right in the breadmachine requires dumping these fragile ingredients in halfway through the bread cycle. This optimum time occurs in our house around 3AM, and no one wants to get up to do this. If Mark had more free time, he would like to make a robotic breadmachine accessory that would dump raisins and nuts into the mix a the right time. The plans for this robot project are given below. Mark would build it, but he doesn't have the time. Can you help us make this project come to life?

**Bicycle Commuter Raisin Walnut Bread**
Ingredients Dry items, store in bag 1 cup .......unbleached white bread flour 1 cup .......stone ground whole wheat flour 1 T .......protein powder 2 T .......gluten flour 1 T .......sugar 1 tsp .......diastatic malt powder 1/2 tsp .......salt 1/3 tsp .......ground cinnamon 1/4 cup ........raisins 1/4 cup .......walnuts Wet items, measure each night 1 1/4 cup .......water 2 T .......canola oil 7/8 t .......instant yeast	Processing These are the basic processing steps. Background information on each step are described below. 1. Go get the dry ingredients. Sources for special ingredients are listed below 2. Put dry ingredients into a 1 quart plastic freezer box, and shake with the lid on to mix up all the stuff. I make 12 dry mixes at a time, enough for 2 weeks worth of baking, and store them until needed. They seem to get better with age. 2 week old mixes make a lighter loaf than a fresh one (further research will be done on this effect). 3. The night of baking, go get one of the dry mixes, the wet ingredients and the bread pan. 4. Clean out the pan if required. 5. Shake up the dry mix again, and dump it into the pan so that the surface of the mix is on an incline. When the wet stuff is added, the part of the mix that sticks above the waterline will be a dry spot for the yeast to hide until kneeding. 6. Add the water to the lower corner of the dry mix. 7. Add oil to the water. 8. Add yeast so that it rests above the waterline in the dry corner. 9. Put pan in machine and set timer.

**Approximate Nutritional Analysis - per loaf**
Calories per loaf:	1601
Calories from protein:	268	17% of total,	goal 30%
Calories from fat:	441	28% of total,	goal 30%
Calories from carbos	892	56% of total,	goal 40%

A basic bread recipe has 84% calories from carbohydrate, 16% from protein and 1% from fat. I find that this heavy weighting of carbohydrates doesn't have a long term effect on my hunger after my morning bike ride to work. The balance of this bread recipe is not the 30/30/40 ratio of protein/fat/carbos of the ideal zone food, but it is closer than just plain old bread. The 1600 calories and 15/30/55 balance of each loaf helps me put in 100 miles of bicycle commuting a week without burning out. To improve it to the point it is at now, I have informally run a design of experiements exercise. If you want to make it more "Zone"-like, leave out the raisins. I continue to look for ways to make the bread closer to the 30/30/40 goal while keeping the final product like a good loaf of regular bread. I could just load up on protein powder and call the resulting lump my special "bread" (not a good idea). Here are the details of the nutritional analysis that I summarzed above, which I did with the help of the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference.:

ingredients	calories	protein	fat	carbo
white bread flour, 1cup:	416	16	0	88
wheat bread flour: 1 cup:	402	16	2	80
protein powder, 1 T:	56	12	0	2
sugar, 1 T:	48	0	0	12
gluten flour, 2 T:	80	16	0	4
oil, 2 T:	252	0	28	0
raisins, 1/4 cup:	116	0	0	29
walnuts, 1/4 cup:	198	4	18	5
yeast, 7/8 t:	33	3	1	3

Sources for special ingredients
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
diastatic malt powder ... Unless you want to buy a 55 gallon drum of the stuff, the only place I know of to buy this key ingredient is to mail order it from King Arthur Flour. They have a web site,

gluten flour
protein powder
instant yeast
bread flour

Background on the processing steps.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Here is a checklist that I use to make sure I have enough dry ingredients to make 12 dry mixes in one session:
5 pounds .......unbleached white bread flour
5 pounds .......stone ground whole wheat flour
1 cup .......protein powder
2 cups .......gluten flour
3/4 cup .......sugar
1/3 cup .......diastatic malt powder
1/6 cup .......salt
2 T .......ground cinnamon
3 cups ........raisins
3 cups .......walnuts

Raisin Robot
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Here are the plans...

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