Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Endless Post
  • Comment
• Hensperger baking books
  • Author
  • Bread Bible -1999
  • BLBMC Editions
• BLBMC – 2000
  • Size
  • Standard Recipes?
  • Organization & Scope
  • Measuring Ingredients
  • Bread Baking basics
  • Dry Yeast
  • Vital Wheat Gluten
  • Advanced Baking
• The New Editions
  • BLBMC 2024
  • Beginners 2023
• What can Go Wrong

Introduction

Endless Post

This post about the Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (“BLBMC“)was published in 2020 and has been revised a few times. I haven’t marked revisions.

I made several revisions in 2025 after learning that:

• the publisher started selling an “affordable abridged edition”,
• the published started selling a “newly revised and expanded” edition , and
• some sources reported that the author Beth Hensperger had died in 2021.

Comment

I have kept my copy of the 2000 edition, and refer to it. I have given up using it as a cookbook – it is not for my bread machine or many other modern bread machines, and not a low sodium cookbook. I rely on recipes that I charted in a spreadsheet.

Hensperger baking books

Author

Beth Hensperger’s biography on the Amazon Store says:

Beth Hensperger, a New Jersey-born who now considers herself a California native, has been educating, writing, and demo-lecturing about the art of baking bread and cooking for thirty years. …

Hensperger’s writing career began when she was chosen as the guest cooking instructor for the March 1985 issue of Bon Appétit. Now she is the author of over twenty cookbooks, including the best-selling Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook series, which includes Not Your Mother’s Recipes for Entertaining, Not Your Mother’s Family Favorites, Not Your Mother’s Weeknight Suppers, and NYMSC Recipes for Two along with the blockbuster first volume, Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook. Also from The Harvard Common Press are The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook, The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook, and The Best Quick Breads. She is also the author of The Bread Bible, winner of the 2000 James Beard Book Award in Baking, and nominated twice for an IACP Cookbook Award.

Hensperger wrote a food column, “Baking with the Seasons,” for the San Jose Mercury News (which was nominated for a James Beard Award in newspaper journalism) for over 12 years until the newspaper downsized.

….

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APB838/about

The Amazon biography is vague on dates.

Beth Hensperger mentioned her experience baking in a restaurant kitchen, and her experience holding workshops, teaching and writing in the introductory chapter “The Art and Science of Good Baking” in her book The Bread Bible (1999). She had a web site with many recipes, as one time. She may have died before March 25, 2021. There is a note by “Darcie” in the blog section of the otherwise paywalled Eat Your Books web site:

We learned through cookbook author Rick Rodgers that acclaimed San Francisco Bay Area-based food writer, cooking instructor, and bread baking maven Beth Hensperger has died after years of declining health. An editor who worked with Hensperger confirmed her passing although there has not yet been an official announcement.

https://www.eatyourbooks.com/blog/2021/03/25/baking-maven-beth-hensperger-has-died

The web site was gone by 2021, and had been high-jacked by web squatters. Information about her life and career are drowned in returns in searches by results for pages published for online booksellers selling copies of her books.

Beth Hensperger wrote, according to online bookseller information, several books about cooking and baking including:

• The Bread Bible: Beth Hensperger’s 300 Favourite Recipes, (1999) Chronicle Books, San Francisco;
• The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (2000), (“BLBMC“) The Harvard Common Press, Boston.

Both those baking books went out of sight.

Bread Bible -1999

The Bread Bible earned the James Beard Foundation award in 2000 in the Baking & Dessert category. It was criticized in an online review at the Fresh Loaf site: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/bookreviews/henspergerbible. It had recipes

• for home bakers who baked in ovens;
• that mainly used ingredients available to retail customers in stores in large American urban centers.

It was published by Chronicle Books, an independent publisher in San Francisco in 1999. It was republished as an e-book – apparently in 2013 when it appeared in Amazon Kindle format. It is not offered for sale online by Chronicle or by other online stores except as an e-book 0r a used book.

She referred to baking as an Art and a Science. She presented it as an art practiced by cooks, and part of the common sense and common knowledge of American cooks. Her writing in this book reflected a perception from her experience as a journalist in California in the late 20th century, that home bakers wanted information on using whole wheat flour, ancient grain, artisan technique and fancy bread, but liked information presented in the form of recipes, using measurement by volume (e.g. cups, tablespoons, teaspoons and fractions of those standards) being personally shared. She cited books that had influenced: the Tassajara Bread Book (1970), A World of Breads (1966), and the novel Reckless Appetites (1993). The book rode the currents of liberation from industrially processed bread.

At that time, home bakers mainly used active dry yeast; some had access to yeast cakes (wet raw yeast). Instant yeasts were available but not widely used. The Bread Bible discussed mixing dough in electric mixers and food processors. It had a chapter on bread machines.

She did not discuss commercial baking, the methods used by commercial bakeries and the methods of professional bakers – e.g. framing recipes for scaling according to Bakers’ percentage – or the food science of baking as understood by other writers.

Ms. Hensperger acknowledged in the Bread Bible that manufacturers had not translated the knowledge and experience of bakers into recipes that could be run by selecting a process in a consumer appliance. Teaching about baking in a book is hard. A book can explain what ingredients should be put in a machine before the buttons are pushed, which buttons to push, and what a loaf may weigh and look like.

BLBMC Editions

The BLBMC was published in 2000 by Harvard Common Press, an imprint of the Quarto Group. The BLBMC preceded titles by Hensperger and other writers in a “Not your mother’s” series published by Quarto imprints. The marketing pitch: using new appliances was exciting, life-affirming and innovative.

In 2023 and 2034 Quarto published two books based on the BLBMC. Both were placed with Walmart and Target stores, and on Amazon, where a book complements the sale of bread machines. Both were sold to libraries and educational web sites and services. The new (posthunous?) books:

• 2023 – Bread machine baking for beginners : effortless perfect bread (“Beginners“), an “affordable abridged edition” of the BLBMC; and
• 2024 – a “newly revised and expanded” edition of the BLBMC.

BLBMC – 2000

Size

The original had an Introduction titled”America’s New Bread Box”, and 615 numbered pages of text including 3 appendices. It had a general index and a separate recipe index.

Standard Recipes?

The BLBMC tried to be “Bread machines – the missing manual” – at the end of the 1990s. It successfully explained basic or core bread flour and whole wheat flour recipes, and how these form the basis of milk bread, sandwich bread, sweet bread, seed bread and raisin or fruit bread.

A subtitle on the cover claimed that the book held “a master baker’s 300-plus favorite recipes for perfect-every-time bread–from every kind of machine“. The BLBMC treated bread machines as generic in the chapter called “Orientation” which has sections called “Batterie de Cuisine: Knowing Your Bread Machine” and “Baking Bread”. The sections on bread machine operation are worthwhile. The BLBMC also has sections, sidebars, and detail sections on bread making and bread machine topics throughout the book,

The Orientation section gave a warning to “Take Stock of Your Machine”. But it presented recipes that were said to work in generic machines. This undersells differences in bread machines. Whether a BLBMC recipe can be followed depends on the machine, measurement and ingredients.

The BLBMC did not anticipate technological and market changes in bread machines. Machines diverged as the market evolved. Machines knead for an optimized time; some machines use the heating element to heat the pan to a proofing box temperature during the rise. Engineers optimized recipes for their companies’ machines – a walled garden approach to recipes. Manufacturers usually provide a manual with recipes to guide the consumer.

The BLBMC also did not anticipate technological and market changes growing and preserving dry yeast, and the evolution of the manufacturing of instant dry yeast.

For the most part, BLBMC recipes worked in my old Black & Decker. They did not work when I started to use a Panasonic SD-YD250, and in a Zojirushi BB-PAC20. I solved the issue for Panasonic SD-YD250 by using 50% less yeast by weight, and for the Zojirushi BB-PAC20.

Organization & Scope

BLBMC recipes have ingredient lists for “medium” 1.5 lb. and “large” 2 lb. loaves. A medium loaf usually uses 3 cups of flour; large, 4 cups. The BLBMC recipes are consistent with conventional oven recipes. BLBMC recipes work if the user can adapt – usually the amount of yeast – for the machine.

BLBMC covers the varieties of white bread, and the method of changing texture and flavour. It has recipes for whole wheat, and ancient grains. It did not anticipate the demand for gluten-free bread recipes and methods, with only 8 pages on that topic.

The table of contents and the index – I refer to the original 2000 edition for these page references – don’t locate all of them:

• p. 15 ingredient measurement;
• p. 18 converting volume to weight (flour and sugar);
• p. 12 flour,
  • pp. 46-47, white flour milled from wheat,
  • pp. 106-107, whole wheat flour,
  • p. 125, proteins in flour,
  • pp. 62-63, using non-wheat flour with wheat flour,
• pp. 133-135, using rye flour with wheat flour. This was possible in some machines but these recipes do not work in many modern machines;
  • p. 140, diy milling of whole grain flour,
  • pp. 150-152, non-wheat flour,
  • pp. 182-183, baking with whole grains, and preparing whole grain;
  • p. 193, organic flour;
• pp. 13-14 yeast;
• p. 15, p. 290. Salt:
  • is not just a seasoning or flavour agent;
  • should not be exposed to the water and the yeast before the machine mixes the ingredients;
  • can be reduced if yeast is reduced by the same proportion ¹BLBMC doesn’t explain that this is a starting point, to be adjusted. Yeast requirements for machines vary;
• p. 13, p. 59 vital wheat gluten;
• p. 168 dough enhancers;
• pp. 69-72 6 “sampler” recipes for one pound loaves;
• p. 76 eggs;
• pp. 170-177, gluten free recipes and notes;
• pp. 197-198 using the machine to mix and knead dough for baking in an oven, and using artisanal baking methods, starters and pre-ferments, shaping loaves, etc.;
• p. 233 olive oil;
• p. 354 the shapes of bread machine pans.

Measuring Ingredients

While Ms. Hensperger was clear about the importance of measurement of ingredients for bread machines, she used home cooking conventions in her recipes including measuring out ingredients by volume. The recipes in the BLBMC measure yeast and salt to the quarter teaspoon, and flour and water to the nearest 1/4 cup; water to the nearest 1/8 cup.

Ms. Hensperger covers conversion from volume to weight for flour but not for yeast, salt and other ingredients. Confusion over volume measurement is endemic to baking. She addresses a problem of stating the flour for a loaf in cups. Flour is compressed or packed by drag-scooping. Ms. Hensperger says, correctly that a cup of bread or whole wheat flour, using drag-scooped cups rather than scoop and trickle cups is 5 US oz. by weight.

Bread Baking basics

The BLBMC says bread flour should be the white flour in bread recipes. White flour is prepared by finely grinding the endosperm (inner portion) of the kernel after the bran (outer coat) and the germ (seed embryo) have been milled out. Millers and bakers refer to extraction – white flour uses 50-60% of the kernel.

Ms. Hensperger describes bread flour as having 12.7 % protein. White bread flour in the USA has 11.5-13.5 % gluten-producing protein. All purpose white flour in the USA has 9.5-11.5 %.  Canadian all purpose flour for retail use is milled from a blend of hard spring wheats – Canadian Millers’ technical standards (Canadian millers produce Bakers patent and bakers clear for commercial bakeries and food manufacturing). Canadian retail all purpose flour has the same protein content as USA bread flour. It is fine for bread.

Whole wheat flour weighs as much as bread flour, per unit of volume, but is milled from entire kernel -100% extraction. It has has more protein overall but less of the insoluble proteins that bond to form gluten when water is mixed into the flour.

Dry Yeast

Ms. Hensperger described the varieties of dry yeast as: 1. active dry yeast; 2. instant (or fast-acting) dried yeast; 3. quick-rise (rapid-rise) yeast; 4. bread machine yeast.  3 and 4 are essentially instant yeast; instant yeast, under any of its names, is the choice for bread machines.  Ms Hensperger said instant yeast – particularly SAF instant yeast – is more potent. She suggests two alternatives for each recipe:

1. SAF instant dried yeast (SAF Red),
2. 25% – 33% more bread machine yeast than SAF instant yeast.  For instance, for Dakota Bread, BLBMC says 2 tsp SAF or 2.5 tsp bread machine.

The book overstates the amount of yeast needed for a loaf of bread. SAF Red is good but other instant yeast works in a BLBMC recipe in the same amount as the BLBMC suggests for SAF instant yeast. The alternative for “bread machine” yeast is usually just too high. Ms. Hensperger moved away from suggesting the use of higher amounts of yeasts other than SAF instant yeast. In a version of the recipe for Dakota Bread in 2015 on her blog she said 2 tsp “bread machine yeast”. Her blog ceased to be maintained and her domain name was later seized by cybersquatters.

The range of views about the amount of yeast:

1. For a 1.5 lb. loaf, Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook calls for 2 tsp instant yeast or more and 1-1.5 tsp. salt for 3 cups of flour. This  is in the range of recipes in other books at the time, and of many recipes published on the web. It is .67 tsp instant yeast, or 1.9 g. yeast per cup (about 140 g.) of wheat flour; the B% is 1.4%;
2. Manufacturers of instant, rapid/quick rise and bread machine yeasts recommend .5 tsp yeast for each cup of flour for bread machines: Red Star Quick-Rise; Bakipan Fast Action and Bread Machine; SAF Gourmet Perfect Rise and  Bread Machine. Fleishmann’s  recipes on its web pages imply the same amounts of its instant Quick-Rise (Rapid-Rise) or its Bread Machine product, or more. This is 1.4 g. yeast per about 140 g. of wheat flour; the B% is 1%;
3. Panasonic suggests .33 tsp of dry yeast per cup of flour – which works in Panasonic machines;
4. Zojirushi suggests .5 tsp. of active dry yeast per cup of flour in its recipes

Salt can be measured by volume with measuring spoons, but should be used carefully with level measurements. It is better to go by weight. The conversion rate is 1 teaspoon of table salt to 5.7 grams – the teaspoon that the recipe writer will have assumed.  Table salt is not all the same – some is pretty finely ground and more dense.

Several online converters report: 1 cup, (48 tsp (US)) instant yeast = 136 grams; 1 tsp = 3.1 g. Some converters report a teaspoon of instant yeast is a .11 oz. = 3.12 grams, or 3.15 g. My average for 1 tsp of SAF Red was 2.8 g. I scooped a few dozen samples, weighed them on a scale, and took the mean weight of my samples. Too close to worry about .1 of a gram. It won’t matter.

I checked conversions for my ingredients for the post Flour, B%, Water, Milk, Salt – Bread & Bread machines.

Vital Wheat Gluten

Vital Wheat Gluten, also called gluten flour. is a powder produced by industrial milling, used as a dough enhancer – an additive in commercial baking.

In the bread machine chapter of the Bread Bible, Ms. Hensperger suggested adding 1 teaspoon per cup of white flour and 1 ½ teaspoons per cup of whole grain flour, She suggested added gluten in almost bread machine recipe in BLBMC. She follows the same rules, with some adjustments for even more gluten for some 100% whole grain loaves. Others would not use added gluten with bread flour but add as much as 1 tbsp per cup with whole wheat flour.

Added gluten makes the dough more elastic – it promotes a vigorous rise if the dough is fermenting vigorously. Elasticitys affect the way the dough flows. It depends on how the dough is kneaded. Kneading organizes gluten into a web of protein that traps carbon dioxide.

Bread machines have changed since BLBMC was published. Most machines knead more thoroughly. Many machines warm the dough and enhance fermentation during the rise phase of the baking machine programs. These features change the requirements for yeast and gluten. The effect of using added gluten will be different depending on the machine and recipe. Adding gluten doesn’t improve yeast leavened breads made with high protein bread flour.

Advanced Baking

The sections of the BLBMC on using a bread machine to mix and knead dough for baking in an oven, and artisanal baking methods are informative. However manufacturers have abandoned – or never have supported the features that facilitate this.

The New Editions

BLBMC 2024

It has a new cover. The new back cover claims the BLBMC was the biggest and best bread-machine cookbook of all time.

The 2024 edition has 293 pages of text including the Introduction titled”America’s New Bread Box”, the text, and the first 2 of the appendices. The 3rd appendix “Resources” and the recipe index are gone. The recipes in the original are repeated. There are 5 new recipes in the section on gluten-free and low gluten loaves. I did not detect any new recipes or any deleted or changed recipes. I am not able to confirm that the 2024 edition is revised or expanded.

The page count has been halved by playing with typeface/font.

Beginners 2023

It has 140 pages of text, and an index. All of the recipes are from the original.

This chapter structure follows the original. There are less recipes. There are no gluten-free recipes in Beginners.

It has the text of the Orientation section of the original, including “What Can Go Wrong, and How to Fix It”. It has chapters like the chapters of the original called:

1. Daily Breads
2. Earth’s Bounty
3. Traditional Loaves
4. All Kinds of Flavours
5. Sweet Loaves
6. Express Breads

What can Go Wrong

Beth Hensperger introduced the topic of “What Can Go Wrong, and How to Fix It” at the end of the Orientation chaptet in all three versions: at pp. 38-39 of the 2000 original, pp. 28-0f the 2024 edition and pp. 42-22 of Beginners. It is a discussion of:

• Shaggy unmanageable dough ball;
• Wet, slick dough;
• Pale loaf;
• Loaf is too dense;
• Sunken top (crater bread);
• Collapsed top and sides;
• Gnarled loaves or machine sound strained during kneading;
• Squat, domed loaves;
• Lopsided loaf; Loaf ballons up over the rim of the pan like a mushroom…
• Bread is not cooked throughout;
• Added ingredients are clumped; and
• After baking, the loaf has a long crease down the side.

Some problems are not readily fit into those categories, and the solutions are can be contradictory. There are other causes with another solution: measurement mistakes, errors in following or understanding the book or a recipe, forgotten steps or pressing the the wrong button on the control panel. Some occur when a user tries to bake a small loaf in a medium or large pan machine. That situation commonly leads to a lopsided loaf, which looks odd but is palatable and managed easily.

Some problems occur when a user uses a flour that does not react well to the machine’s kneading program(s) – such as rye flour.

Bread baking can be automated. Some problems arise from trusting baking some breads was automated by any particular manufacturer or recipe.