Grocery store bread is absolutely horrible. I cannot imagine why people tolerate white balloon bread. Decent bread in the grocery store is over $2 a pound. I have been using a bread machine since they first came out at Williams Sonoma and cost $400. I repaired and used that machine for 10 years but now I have a new one and it is easier to use.  The new machine was cheaper than the parts for the old one and it works well.

             I use regular flour. I know, they sell flour especially for bread at twice the price and it works just as well. Use white flour for white bread. You can make bread with flour, sugar, yeast and water. It will taste better than balloon bread but you can do better. I find that whole wheat flour is much harder to get along with than regular white flour so I use mostly regular flour. I usually use soy grits in place of butter and I almost always add a bit of crystalline vitamin C to a loaf

             A bread machine has instructions with it and mostly they will work well. The better the ingredients you put into the bread, the better it will be for you to eat, so enjoy it and think how expensive the good bread you are enjoying would be at the grocery store.  Yeast in little packets is too expensive so, buy it by the pound at Costco and keep it in the freezer with a ready supply outside in a jar for use in the bread.

               There is a good reason for using some whole wheat flour. Bran, the outside of the wheat grain keeps you regular. Forget laxatives, they are expensive, addictive and bad for you. Bran in your diet softens stool and keeps everything going, you cannot overdose on it and it even has some food value. Every time a friend brings us loaves of sourdough bread and I stop making my bread, my wife gets constipated. Now I make sure she eats my bread too. It only takes a slice or two a day and my bread is only 1/3 whole grain. Is it not amazing just how little decent bread it takes to keep you from straining to shit and giving yourself hemorrhoids

                 Actually I have a mill and mill my own whole grains. We bought it cheap in the auction and I started using it. It is a very simple device with an electric motor and two stones, one of which is fixed and the other mounted on the shaft of the motor. The grain goes down a chute into the center of the fixed stone and the rotating stone throws it out and it has to pass between the stones and get ground in order to get out. About once a year I have to take it apart and scrub the stones.

                 Stone mills are not supposed to work on oily seeds like sunflower. If you try, the seeds mush up in the stones and that, my friends, is that, until you take it all apart and scrub it. However, if you mix wheat and sunflower seeds, the mixture will go through the mill. With a mill it is possible to put all kinds of neat grains into your bread and keep yourself from suffering from deficiency diseases even if you eat nothing but your own bread. I mill up sunflower seeds, amaranth, flax seeds, millet and quinioa along with my wheat. I mix the seeds in equal parts, mix the seed mix with a little more whole wheat and pour it all through the mill just before I put it into the bread machine. Fresh milled flour like this has rather a pleasant smell and contains the oils from the seeds. Some of these oils react slowly with air and oxidize, but, once they are in the dough, there is no oxygen there so they can no longer do that.

                Amaranth is a neat plant. It is native to Peru, I think, and was the seed grain of the Inca Empire rather than wheat. They had maize and potatoes too. Wheat contains all the amino acids required by man except one. Amaranth contains that last amino acid in its little brown seeds. Grind up wheat and amaranth together for your bread and you really can live on it.

                Is it not a marvellous age in which we live? The baking of bread used to be an endless process requiring attention all the time and usually done by a professional baker. Now the machine does it.
               Celebrate.