>At the moment, I'm enjoying a declicious slice of milk-free toast fresh
>from the
>bread oven. Thought I might as well start by sharing my favorite recipe.
>I'm also
>interested in any other great, tried, tested and true non-milk bread
>machine recipes.

The first several milk-free loaves from our bread machine were terrible:
hard, thick crusts and very chewy.

Quite by accident, I found what some other bakers know well - if you can't
add milk to a bread, add some extra wheat gluten. I went to a class at the
Boston Museum of Science with my son. It was a class on kitchen chemistry.
One of the things that we did was mix up various substances with water.
When we mixed gluten with water, it got quite sticky. The teacher explained
that gluten was wheat protein, and a light went on for me: the bread had
sugar, so it wasn't suffering from a lack of lactose, but was lacking the
milk protein. I added gluten to my next batch and it came out perfect, with
a thin, light crust and just the right texture throughout. I experimented
and found that a tablespoon of gluten per pound of bread was about right.


Mark Feblowitz