Bread making is a delicate process! Good luck

I cheat.

1) Buy an electric bread maker
2) Buy a pack of bread mix. You can get some really good ones these days - sourdough, multiseed, parmesan and sun dried tomatoes, ciabatta, etc
3) Follow the instructions

You get all the benefits of making your own bread - the smell, the freshness, the crustiness, the slightly irregular loaf so guests are impressed by your baking efforts - but with very consistent results, <1 min of prep time and no faffing around measuring out yeast, etc. Re the other thread, bread maker is also great for making pizza dough.

+1. We live in the 21st century. You're crazy not to take advantage of the technology.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

We've owned 2 bread makers, while they do indeed make bread consistently. Only problem is, I nor my wife have ever liked how heavy the bread turns out. Both machines produced loaves with a dense cake like structure rather than something light & airy. Didn't seem to matter what we used for ingredients.

If your bread is dense there are two potential culprits:


1. You are using too much flour even though the recipe tells you the "right" amt.
2. You need to use a different type of flour


I switched to King Arthur flour after a couple of loaves of dense bread. It made a big difference.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Ours makes lovely light and airy bread. I doubt it's anything special about the machine, as ours is a 9 year old Panasonic and wasn't particularly fancy or expensive. We do find that if we don't take the bread out of it quite quickly after it's baked then it can collapse and become too dense. Maybe that's the issue? If not, then must be the bread mix you're using. As I say, can't really help on that front as I just buy the packs of pre-mixed stuff.

My in-laws insisted on mixing their own flour, yeast, etc, but after years of basically admitting that our results were almost invariably better they've switched to the pre-mixed packs. I couldn't even tell you what brand of mix we're using, I just grab whatever looks good at the supermarket and it nearly always works out fine, including various supermarket own brands.

I was making our bread for a few months. I think over kneeding is another cause of dense bread.

Curious, what's the humidity where you live usually like? What altitude? My wife claims that weather conditions have a large bearing on how bread "acts". By that, I think she means the yeast.