The last few times I’ve made this I thought it had slightly too much honey!

The diagnosed celiac population varies country by country and ranges from 1 in 5000 down to 1 in 150 according to what country you look at and how aware the medical community are.

Whilst the 1 in 500 could represent over diagnosis ( irritable bowel syndrome being classed as celiac condition) the 1 in 5000 for countries with essentially a similar genetic profile suggests that many coeliac cases are not being diagnosed.

When there’s a small population of people who have a particular diagnosed condition that requires a specialized diet, it can certainly give pause to wonder about subclinical sensitivities in other populations that don’t typically think of themselves as affected.

While on the momentary topic of what foods to avoid, there’s also the tangential issue of those who can’t afford to eat anything, and the diets they are forced to consume to stave off hunger pangs.

Maybe one day we will figure out how to compassionately handle all of these dietary and health problems with equivalent acumen.

Thanks for stopping by.

Over the period I have had to learn how to amend recipes to take into account the reactions of different flour types but your posting here has opened my eyes to a whole new underlying chemistry relating to bread making. In particular your thoughts on the impact of the yeast …. back to the kitchen experiments.

I’m also making a longer comment that includes additional information about yeast leavening for breads, information that I’ve either gathered or learned over the years. It all began decades ago, when my second attempts at bread making resulted in dough that failed to rise properly. . . .

Addendum

My bread machine is a slightly larger one than some, yours may be smaller, so it’s possible that it’s slightly too much dough for yours. The best way that I know to adjust ingredients downward or upward is not by the historical or customary U.S. measure (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc., all of which are volumetric measures), but by mass and or weight.

For example, the whole grains are likely a different volumetric amount when milled finely as flour, so if one wanted to substitute whole wheat flour for the cracked wheat berries, perhaps because you don’t like their texture in the baked bread, especially the crust, then weigh out the above recipe’s cup measure of “cracked wheat”, note the weight, and then substitute an equivalent weight of whole wheat flour. In this example, there was no downward or upward adjustment.

If an increase or decrease in the total amount or batch of dough had been desired, a simple mathematical percentage adjustment is possible, but all the ingredients would need to be weighed, then reduced (or increased) so each ingredient’s respective weight-ratios remain constant to each other. I’m certain this is easiest with metric instead of avoirdupois weights. The recipe ingredients above haven’t been transcribed to weight because I do not have an acceptable kitchen scale for weighing ingredients, and it seems the best way is not to follow a conversion formula, but to actually weigh. Perhaps one day. . . .

Dough moisture is a little trickier since atmospheric conditions vary, but for those of us who’ve kneaded dough by hand more than a few times, after awhile, a sense is developed as to what the dough should “feel” like, so when first learning, trial and resulting error, along with analysis and intentional correction, tends to work out any ratio problems. Or you could use a moisture analyzer, such as that linked in robert sands’ comment above, which likely achieves a high batch-to-batch consistency. Moisture levels affect the yeast and the dough’s rise.

Non-viable or no-longer-alive yeasts are often the cause behind yeast-bread failures. Most bread machine recipes seem to use instant yeast. Converting instant to active dry yeast is another conversion to be aware of; the recipe above uses active dry yeast. The reason I don’t use instant yeast is the flavor it added to plain, non-sweetened white breads. I made that choice some years ago, perhaps in the 1980s, after a taste test on two nearly identical and baked white-bread loaves whose only ingredients were flour, water, yeast (too much yeast), and salt, changing only the yeast type in each loaf. Now that I’ve written it out, I see I should have omitted the salt, for the purposes of comparing the two yeasts’ flavors.

It’s possible that the instant yeast strains sold now have improved or regressed since then, I simply don’t know. It’s claimed by the manufacturers that active dry yeast doesn’t work well unless it’s first dissolved in water before adding to the dough, a disclaimer not applied to instant yeasts, but with the active dry yeast strains available in the past, I haven’t found this to be a big issue for the purposes of substituting in a bread machine. Manufacturers from time to time update their processes resulting in a change to their product(s); they may change their yeast strain and consider that information proprietary: so sometimes these ‘improvements’ aren’t announced to the end user, and the only thing a home baker may notice is that the recipe doesn’t seem to rise precisely the same way it used to. Therefore, while mixing active dry yeast in with the dry ingredients has worked in the past, as in the recipe above, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to work in the future. For those who are attempting to troubleshoot a poor rise, if the bread machine will begin its cycle immediately (not using the timer function to delay the beginning of the machine’s bread-making process), then dissolving the active dry yeast into cool, or slightly warm water (subtracted from the recipe’s measured amount), may be an additional step to consider.

Different types of yeast are commercially available and which usually require a conversion for substitution, but the critical point is that generally they may be substituted for each other in recipes if you learn how. Some commercial bakeries apparently like cream yeast, this yeast type is said to be nearly impossible for home bakers to obtain. Other bakeries use compressed (cake) yeast, it may be easier to obtain, but it’s not necessarily widely available to home bakers, though I used it at least once as a young child before I really knew what or why yeast was used in some breads. At the time it came in a foil wrapped cube about 1/2″ per side, and it was purchased at the grocery store. Both cream and compressed yeasts are said to have a short refrigerator life. These are likely considered premium yeasts, I believe they’re referred to as ‘fresh yeasts’.

‘Dry yeasts’, which include both the newer Instant types and the decades-long-standing Active Dry Yeast, have both had their moisture reduced (I’m guessing by a vacuum and temperature process), and as a result they have a much longer shelf life when they are stored under such a vacuum, as long as they do not get too hot. Today, these two types of commercial yeasts seem widely available to home bakers. Some also use wild-yeasts, but I’m limiting my discussion to commercially-available yeasts. Instant Yeast and Active Dry Yeast may be substituted for each other, but will need a substitution conversion: one rule of thumb I’ve seen is that you need up to twice as much Active Dry Yeast in any recipe that calls for Instant Yeast, others claim the conversion is less than that: the bottom line is always to use the least amount of your chosen yeast that will rise your bread both in the allotted rise time & at the temperatures you’re using.

Some bakers have extolled the virtues of poolish, a sponge method of pre-fermentation that can be made with various yeast types. If you want to know more, do a search, or visit this Authentic French Bread using poolish tutorial, or get a copy of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which has a section covering it. One quite practical advantage of poolish is that you have some confirmation of your yeasts’ viability before mixing all the dough’s ingredients; it also seems to improve the crumb, which is desirable.

An outside-the-box information source regarding how temperature and time affects enzyme chemistry, which is said to be at work in bread-dough rises is, surprisingly enough, all-grain liquid-bread or beer brewers. Artisan brewers have been sharing information on the Internet about these enzymatic digestive processes that critically occur during their mash of malted grains for a long number of years. Mash simplistically refers to modulated-temperature steeping of the grains, while malted simplistically refers to sprouted grain. With beer, a common malted grain reportedly used is barley. Of the bread flours that I’ve purchased, their labels have reported they contain a small percentage of barley flour. After the mash portion of making wort, brewers strain it, and at some point when it’s cool enough, the yeast is pitched into the wort which starts the fermentation process. Obviously, bread and all-grain beer are not the same products, yet there are conceptual parallels that seem somewhat-to-quite similar, certainly so when one considers that a portion of this bread’s recipe starts with cooking cracked wheat berries.

Rise time is related to temperature: the warmer it is, up to a point, the faster the dough rises; the cooler it is down to freezing (which marks another point), the slower the dough rises. Rising temperatures likely should never exceed 110-120°F, as these and higher temperatures are said to begin killing the yeasts. Lower rising temperatures are better. It’s also said that rising dough is usually warmer inside the dough, though I’ve never measured this. Here’s a comprehensive bread-making reference that seems decently short for the amount of information, is well organized, and has a nice troubleshooting chart. This reference claims yeasts’ terminal temperature is 140°F.

I’ve made some wonderful pizza doughs with very little yeast using covered rising (for high humidity so a skin or crust doesn’t form) in a non-heated room on a cool Southern California day, but it takes longer to rise. Mix the dough in the morning, bake in the evening, or something like that.

Currently, we don’t seem to be able to lengthen the pre-programmed ‘rise time’ of bread machines, or change the pre-programmed rise-temperatures, the only way to vary the rise is to increase the yeast amount: this is not the ideal way to approach yeast bread, so perhaps these automatic machines have been slightly over simplified. In general, the less yeast you are able to use, using lower rising temperatures and increased rise times, and still achieve a satisfactory rise, improves the baked bread’s flavor.

I don’t prefer the way our particular machine makes whole wheat bread using the whole wheat setting, and other than studying any timing information which may be included in the documentation, and which may or may not be accurate, the only way to know if there’s another option is to try a setting other than what the manual recommends.

I currently tend to make two loaves at the same time, and am thinking of increasing that to four, so when making more than a single loaf, I bake it in our typical home oven. The recipe above works in my bread machine just as well, with only an increase in the yeast amount, and when using it there’s no timer or rising dough to watch, no temperature knob to adjust at any particular times, so bread machines are definitely more convenient for a single loaf. Most typical oven-baked yeast-bread recipes can be adapted for a bread machine, or vice versa. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether you use a bread machine, or regular oven, a brick oven, or even a convection oven which is likely ideal, for baking bread, though each method seems to have its unique characteristics that require some adaptations.

A simpler way to approach yeast bread is to find recipes that you like, get a bread machine for hands off operation, and let the complicated stuff go. Using a bread machine which does the kneading, rising, and baking, all hands off except for the initial measuring and loading of ingredients, is one very-convenient method that tends to achieve quite uniform results provided that you measure ingredients carefully and your yeast is viable.

If they were ground finely enough, I believe the resulting product would typically be called whole wheat flour.