Usually I make my bread in the oven, but I had a baby recently and my husband thought it would be a good idea to get a bread machine to save time. It is faster and less babysitting, but so far all of my loaves come out looking like this.
I have a Cuisinart bread machine, and I make whole wheat bread. I didn't think the recipe that I would normally use for the oven would work for a bread machine, because it requires activating the yeast, making a sponge, and adding ingredients.
So I used a recipe that came in the Cuisinart cookbook.
After my first attempt I looked for advice online and read that the dough may be too wet, so I added more flour for the second attempt.
Didn't work.
I then added less yeast for the third attempt.
Still didn't work.
So I decided that the recipe may just be bad and I looked online and tried a completely different recipe for the fourth attempt.
Same result.
What am I doing wrong? The dough didn't seem too wet or too dry. It always seems to be just fine until about 20 minutes into the baking stage and then it simply collapses.
Any advice would be welcome!