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I know this is kind of backwards, versus what you see a lot of people doing (rising dough and a bread maker and baking in a regular oven), but I teach middle school and another teacher has a bread maker in the classroom, and has been baking bread for the kids.

I make sourdough bread in a conventional oven, and haven't used a breadmaker. We wanted to do an activity around mixing and rising sourdough, and learning about yeast. But then to put it in the bread maker so the kids could see it fresh baked.

Is there usually a setting for this, and or would you recommend a temperature and time? Is it pretty comparable to temperature and time I would normally use? I bake at 430 to 470 F for about 50-55 minutes.

Can I set a breadmaker to skip the mix and rise steps?

Thank you!

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    It really depends on the breadmaker, some can be set just to bake, other cannot. If it has a bake mode then you'll see how to use it in the manual for that model.
    – GdD
    Sep 25 at 13:06
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    GdD, that's pretty much the answer to this question.
    – FuzzyChef
    Sep 25 at 15:42
  • It's half of one maybe @FuzzyChef, let me see what I can do.
    – GdD
    Sep 25 at 17:04
  • It's worth mentioning that sourdoughs are mostly bacterial species (lactobacilli mostly) and wild yeasts, so much much slower than added baker's yeast. You could do the yeast type and compare it to sourdough - set both up one day in two bowls, have the yeast one done in a couple of hours, and the sourdough the next day. Or you could just do conventional baker's yeast alone.
    – bob1
    Sep 26 at 1:02

2 Answers 2

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Whether you can just bake or not depends on the model of breakmaker, some have separate modes for proofing and/or baking whereas more basic ones tend to only have only full programs. You'd need to look at the manual to be sure.

If it does have a bake only mode then you certainly can bake sourdough in a breakmaker, you'd want to follow the quantities for the breadmaker's recipes to make sure the result will fit, and allow for lots of oven spring. Too much spring and it could pop the lid open, which is a huge pain to clean up.

As for temperature and time they should be very similar, an oven is an oven at the end of the day. How quickly it will heat up varies from model to model, you may need to add a small amount of time to an oven baked method to account for heat-up time, just a few minutes at most. The challenge will be to determine if the bread is done, you can't pull it out and tap the bottom, I suggest instead you use a digital instant read thermometer to check the center temperature, anything above 208°F/97°C is done.

I would suggest testing ahead of time to get the ins and outs of the machine.

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    Thanks a lot! Gives me confidence to try this out. I'll try going by the overall weight as I usually bake about a kilo @ 89% hydration so will have to scale things down a lot (or keep extra dough for pizza). I wonder if I this breadmaker has no bake-only mode, could I run the whole cycle and since sourdough rises so much slower, I could put it in for the final 2-3h of rise/proof time, even though most of the fermentation is already done. Will test this out if I need to! Thanks again.
    – jywarren
    Sep 26 at 15:55
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I regularly use my bread machine (a Panasonic "automatic bread maker") to bake sourdough. It has a "Bake only" program that allows bake times from 30m-1h30m. But I'm making it overnight, and longer programs that also knead and have fixed baking times are what I use. The recipes suggested in the breadmaker's instructions work fine with the substitution of starter for yeast. Baking temperatures for my machine are pre-programmed and work about as well for sourdough as for conventional bread.

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  • Thanks, this was helpful!
    – jywarren
    Sep 26 at 15:54

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