Hi. I have a Zojirushi BBCC-V20 that I hardly ever use and I find it quite
hit or miss, frankly. Yesterday I made a really good oatmeal bread; today
I am TRYING to make an oatmeal maple bread but I'm having a problem. The
recipe (from a cookbook called Bread Machine Baking or something like
that) says that I should put the ingredients in in the right order and
blah blah, and then use the machine's "basic cycle, medium crust" setting.
OK, so, I did that and then I left the machine for a while; I returned to
check on it and found it allegedly in the middle of the first rise - but
the dough was not ready - I could see through the window it was all
crumbly. So, I took it out and added a little water until it became
cohesive, and kneaded it a little bit just to make it stick together and
shoved it back into the machine, and started over on basic cycle again. My
question is - what would have been the best thing to do? The machine has a
homemade bread cycle option, I could have said "preheat x minutes, knead y
minutes, rise z minutes, knead a minutes, rise b minutes, knead c minutes,
rise d minutes, bake w minutes -- but I have no idea what would have been
apppropriate to fill in for those variables. So, will restarting the basic
cycle over be ok, given that it obviously still DOES need all that
kneading and rising? Or what? and in the future, how can I figure out how
many minutes to set this sucker for?

Thanks for any tips from a bread machine loser,
h.


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