Bread-Machine Questions...

Hi Garry,

I've baked a heck of a lot of bread, though have to confess I don't use a bread machine, but hopefully I can help you.

(BTW there is a famous Saltless Tuscan bread, you could google if you want some other ideas).

In general, to get light whole grain breads is more of a challenge than white bread. It could have to do with issues other than your salt.

You could try cutting down the fat to one tbsp in that recipe, and I'd also tweak that "7 grain flour". In general, whole grains take a little more effort to get the gluten right to get a really good rise. So some recipes mix with white flour (which has more readily available gluten, to make a long story short, the gluten, the stringy stuff, provides much of the structure that traps the air bubbles to give a good rise), and others do techniques like soaking the whole grain flour in water in advance, and trying to improve the gluten development that way. 3% fat (maximum) in a cereal technology book I read a ways back is a rough figure of an amount of fat that will help give a good rise.

Do you know the ingredients of your 7 grain flour, it often will have ground flax (more fat), and other low gluten grains like oats, sometimes even sunflower seeds (= more fat), but in general those 7 grain mixes have low gluten, and sometimes higher fat. Buckwheat has no gluten. rye and oats are a gluten challenge. So what I would do is consider changing that 7 grain mix to either something you concoct yourself, say put whole flax seeds in there, soaked millet, sunflower seeds, oat bran, whatever, and/or mix with spelt or a grain that is not gluten free. Or you can just sub it for whole wheat flour.

My mom does a nice WW in her bread machine from stone ground flour. If you can get stone ground conveniently, you might find an improvement there too.

You can also use your bread machine's cycles to help you with part of the process, then bake it out in the oven too, let it rise further in a loaf pan if need be.

Gotta run, some ideas for you anyway.