[sebanks]

Everytime I bake bread, whether that be sour dough or banana bread my bread falls. I have an oven thermometer, and I'm pretty sure the temperature drops quite a bit before the oven reheats during baking. Also, sometimes the temperature is off by 25 degrees or so (not consistently too high or too low). I just made banana bread yesterday (pretty standard recipe) and baked it at 350 for 45 min. The outside of the bread was dark brown, but the middle was completely uncooked so I left it in for another 15 min and put a cookie sheet on the top rack so the bread wouldn't burn on top. When I was letting the loaf cool, it sunk in the middle about 2 1/2 inches, leaving a gooey mess in the bottom of the loaf pan. BTW, I usually use a doughmakers loaf plan. Any thoughts/advice would be greatly appreciated!

THANKS!

[cwshields]

You could try baking at 325 for a longer time. I don't usually time when baking bread I go by looks. Banana bread gets real dark on top and white bread a nice golden brown. Maybe your oven is losing heat and having to cycle the elements on too often . I'm sure someone here can give a better explaination and fix for the under cooked middle.

[castironchef]

If your problem is a flakey oven, then you should (a) have it serviced, (b) use on oven thermometer (never trust a thermostat) and (c) increase your oven's thermal capacitance by using a large, thick pizza or baking stone (even if you don't bake ON the stone, the stone's presence in the oven will help even out the heat fluctuations).

Give those a try and you can rule out oven issues.

[DC Sunshine]

Store your bread on the floor to stop it falling

[MikeLM]

Ooooohh... there's one in every crowd.

Actually, you beat me to it.

Mike

[greenawalt87]

put it on the counter not on the edge to stop it from falling

[brreynolds]

Hidden among the above puns was what seems to be the best starting advice: check the oven temperature.

If you're having trouble with both yeast breads (sourdough) and baking powder breads (banana) falling, this points to your taking the breads out of the oven before they are baked firmly enough to hold their structure. Each kind can fall for other reasons, but if they are both falling, they probably aren't baked.

If your oven setting is in the 325-350 range and you are baking for the required amount of time, that shouldn't be happening consistently.

I suggest getting an accurate probe-style thermometer, or some other kind that you can easily see while the oven is running, and then set it at 350 and monitor the temperature periodically. It will rise and fall during this process; ovens don't keep an exactly constant temperature. But the fluctuation shouldn't be dramatic, the set temperature should be the mid-point of the fluctuations, and the oven should spend a good amount of time at the temperature it is set for. If those things aren't happening, the temperature control or the heating elements are not working right.

My mother was having a similar consistently-underdone-baking problem a while ago, and it turned out that one of the two heating elements that was supposed to be bringing her oven up to temperature didn't work most of the time.