#my main problem is that I cant get the temperature to stay at a consistent level due to using heavy wiring

[thebibliosphere]

im curious. why is it that every time i try and make bread it doesnt cook all the way through in spite of me following the directions exactly? u make a lot of bread so i thought u might know. i dont have a breadmaker btw, i use the oven because i cant afford one.

Breadmakers are okay and good for those who can afford them. I can’t so I’ve never used one :)

And hmm, are you cutting into it before it’s cooled? Bread will actually keep baking once you pull it out the oven. It needs the cool down phase to finish this and I’ve watched too eager people cutting into it straight out the oven and complaining it’s raw inside, whereas if they’d waited 10-20 minutes more for it to reach room temp it’d be completely fine inside. As an aside, I prefer to make my breads the night before and allow them to sit overnight, particularly with sourdoughs. It helps the flavor develop IMO. It’s a trick I learned from my bakery days. Anyway.

That aside the most common cause of consistently underbaked bread tends to do with your oven. Either it’s not being allowed to preheat like it should (my oven will take a half hour to heat up to what I need for bread, but I will often leave if preheating for an hour for optimal results), or the thermostat is slightly off inside your oven, and you’re either running a little bit too hot, meaning the outside looks done and can actually burn before the inside is done baking, or you’re slightly under so the outside is just getting crisp but the inside hasn’t had time to cook despite being in there for the correct amount of time. You might even get a hollow tapping sound when you knock on the base, and still have this result.

It’s a problem I always had with my mother’s oven, until I bought an oven thermometer, and checked the oven thermostat against what the thermometer said. Her oven was about 40′c lower than it was ought to be, so I adjust the thermostat accordingly whenever I bake with her oven. 

You can get cheap oven thermometers for under $10 on amazon, if that might be something you’re interested in looking into.

You can also use an instant read thermometer to check whether bread is done on the inside or not. For breads made without egg, the  internal temperature should be allowed to reach 205 to 210′f or 96 to 99'c depending on where you are in the world.  For egg based breads the temp needs to reach 185'F/85′c.

Also how are you measuring your flour? By weight or cups? If it’s cups, are you spooning the flour into the cup, or whisking it first? I ask because spooning/aerating the flour into a measuring cup, rather than taking up an even scoop with a sweeping motion, can result in too little flour in the cup, meaning your dough will stay wet, and not bake properly. Same with if you press down too hard when scooping up flour, you could actually compact the flour in, getting too much flour, which will result in a dense, heavy dough that bakes like a brick. It’s honestly why I prefer to measure things like flour by weight rather than volume, but I know not everyone has digital scales.

Those are the two main things I can think of. Oven heat and flour consistency. If you try measuring out your flour differently and it still does it, I’d look to your oven as being the culprit. Best of luck!