On 9/8/2020 at 3:49 PM, Kim Shook said:My frustration at this bread machine just grows and grows. I was in the dining room when I was using it to make the Milky Loaf on 8/28 and never heard the “beep” at the end. I think that the “keep warm” function allowed the loaf to overcook. So yesterday, I set my phone alarm for a couple of minutes before it was supposed to be done, so I could be beside it and make sure that the “beep” sounded. I checked the time left when my alarm went off by tapping the “Start/Stop/Pause” button less than a second (as the instructions seem to say). I must have paused it, though, because when I checked it again, it had the same amount of time on it. Sigh. I never heard the beep because I just took it out at that point. I really don’t know if I’m going to be able to make anything besides the basics. No matter how much I read it, I can’t seem to understand how to change it from the default settings.
Your KBS looks very similar to the Cuisinart (CBK-100) I had before my current machine. Like, weirdly similar. Same bread pan design, same paddle design, very similar case design. Heck, per the manuals, they both apparently come with the same strange two-sided measuring spoon (which was long gone when I picked mine up second hand). I would wager the KBS is a further development of the same design. (The Cuisinart had fewer programs, and no nut dispenser.)
The layout of the display is almost *exactly* the same as well -- numerical menu selection in the middle, three loaf sizes from left to right at the top, three crust colors from left to right at the bottom, and current baking phase along the sides.
The manual for the Cuisinart might be helpful to you -- it's at least a lot easier to read!
In any case — with that machine, I never had good luck with the recipes that came with it — and the key to not overbaking was the crust control ("color" on yours, I think?), not the keep warm cycle. "Color" seems to just be a slight adjustment in the bake time -- so if the loaf is getting overbaked on the default "medium," you can hit "color" twice to cycle to "light" and it'll bake it a little less.
As an aside -- have you only made recipes from the recipe book that came with the machine, so far? If so, I would strongly recommend trying a solid loaf from a good cookbook or a website like KAF instead. You'd think the recipes in the manual for a given machine would be the closest to perfect, but I've found they're often really unreliable. I think it might be a different sort of translation issue — if the manual is translated from another language, you can bet the recipes were developed with different flour than we get here.
The source I go back to most often for bread machine recipes is Beth Hensperger's The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook; pretty much everything I've tried from it is rock solid (and you can buy a used copy for <$10). But I am pretty sure I successfully made this recipe from KAF in my Cuisinart a couple of times -- so it could be a good benchmark.
I also made this recipe a lot in that machine -- my partner grew up eating Health Nut bread and I was trying to come up with something with the same flavors. This is based on the KAF "100% Whole Wheat for the Bread Machine" but I tweaked it a fair amount. The below should be for a 1.5lb loaf:
300g lukewarm water
25g olive oil or vegetable oil
78g maple syrup
350g King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour or Premium Whole Wheat Flour
50g rye flour
25g cornmeal
25g sunflower, sesame or flax seeds, or a combination
35g nuts
1.5 tablespoons vital wheat gluten
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast (I always use SAF Red)
(I baked it on the wheat cycle, and just threw the nuts in at the beginning; they get broken up, but that's fine with me for a sandwich loaf.)
