On Mar 15, 1:10 am, "graham" > wrote:
> "anthony" > wrote in message
>
> oups.com...
>
> > HI there
> > I bake in a relatively high altitude of 1000 metres or more than 3000
> > feet (Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia).
>
> I'm at ~1100m (~3600') in Calgary in a very dry climate.
>
> > It took me some adjustment to cope with the higher altitude than I was
> > used to, but I finally found that baking at 140 degrees Celsius for
>
> That's awfully low - do you mean 240C?
>
> > around 35 minutes produced a perfect loaf. I'm using 2 cups of hard
> > baker's flour to 1.5 cups of mixed-grain.
>
> A few years ago, after baking bread for over 25 years, I experienced failure
> after failure. I decided to go back to basics and got out the baking books
> and followed a basic recipe to the letter. Result? A perfect loaf.
> I think that over time, one can become sloppy or experience "recipe drift"
> (especially if you use cup-measure rather than weighing your ingredients)and
> it might be worthwhile your going back to first principles. I suggest that
> you weigh out 500g of bread flour (no additions of other stuff), 325ml (or
> grams) of water, add 2tsp of salt and use 2tsp of instant yeast (or
> equivalent). This is a basic recipe for a 65% hydration loaf which should
> work with hard wheatflour (that's what I'm used to here). If this produces
> a decent loaf (and it should) you can then start fiddling with the flour
> proportions.
> You can also look at:
> http://planeguy.mine.nu/bread/index....on=faq&page=88
>
> If you have any problems with bread, post on alt.bread.recipes where you
> will get stacks of advice.
> HTH
> Graham

OK, thanks Graham; I'll give that a try. By the way, the 140C is
correct .. anything higher and I bake the outside hard, leaving the
dough gluggy inside. 140C corresponds to 285 Fahrenheit.
Cheers