As a Christmas gift, my family was gifted with a bread maker this year. I love this for many reasons! As someone with a soy allergy, it is hard to find bread from the stores that are not processed with it. I would rely on fresh bread from bakeries or make it from scratch when we needed it. Therefore, this is really a wonderful gift idea. It saves money and time. I find that if I am around the house and want to make a loaf, it is about 3 hours from start to finish and you can be as original and creative as you want to be. After we got it, we tried to make a basic white loaf and we kept getting a fairly dry loaf and we couldn’t figure out why. Interesting enough, we talked with my Mother-in-law and she explained trying something with the flour that we had not thought of. She mentioned spooning in the flour into the cup as opposed to putting the cup scoop into the flour and levelling it off. I guess by placing the cup in we were actually adding more flour, hence the dryness. The reason this mattered is because we live at a higher altitude here in the mountains and for bread in particular, it cooks faster in the bread maker because of it. This is a wonderful trick and changed our bread and I hope it will for you too, if you decide to as well.

This got me thinking, what else is affected in cooking from high altitude Apparently quite a bit, including eggs! I had no idea! Anyways, I am going to try a raisin and a dill bread (as I used to love this when I was a kid) as my next bread experiments. What kind of bread would you like to see me make? What kind of breads are you making at home?

Hope you are staying healthy and safe.

-Deb