I’ve had a bread machine for years. I use it all the time.
Recently, I wondered if you could use Cheezies, the Canadian snack food, to make bread using this machine. So I experimented with a recipe for cheese and onion bread from an old Black & Decker machine recipe book, which I use with my newer machine, which is made by Hamilton-Beach and has a single mixing blade in the middle of the bread pan.
Cheezies are made out of corn meal, cheese and other stuff and are horribly addictive. They are a legendary Canadian snack food. I think the equivalent in the USA would be Cheetos which are crunchy (not cheese snacks which are puffy and full of air).
I foolishly bought a large package of Cheezies at Costco in Canada which contained all these 36g Hallowe’en-size bags of the snack. It comes in other sizes as well, as you can see from the Cheezies home page, http://www.cheezies.com
In order to prepare for making the bread (below), I took two of these 36g bags, which weighed approximately 80g (just a bit less than 3 oz.), dumped them into a bowl and using a mortar-and-pestle style method, crushed them up into a powder. You can do the same thing using a blender. This produces about ¾ cup of crushed Cheezies, well-packed.
Anyway, here is the bread recipe:
1½ cups of water – I heat these up in the microwave using a Pyrex measuring cup for around 30 seconds and dump this into the bread pan. If you think the temperature is too hot, by the time all the ingredients are in the pan, it will be OK, trust me.
3 tbsp of powdered milk – I also used just 1½ cups of skim milk, also warmed up, that worked OK too.
2 tbsp of white sugar
2 tsp of salt (original recipe calls for 1½ tsp)
3¾ cups of bread flour or all-purpose flour in Canada; in the USA, **use 4 cups of bread flour** (that’s what the recipe says)
¾ cup of powdered Cheezies (as created above)
1½ tsp of bread machine yeast
Use the Sweet Bread Setting, this recipe is for a 2 lb. loaf. The second kneading for this bread type on my machine is VERY long. Choose the crust you want if there is a selection.
I have also added 2 tbsp of dried onion flakes or 1 tsp of lemon zest or 1 tsp of some mixture of spices (dill and other stuff) to this bread, it turned out fine. On my machine, the bread is first mixed, and then it is mixed really well, with the blade going non-stop. After the non-stop action starts, I open up the machine, and using a plastic scraper, make sure there isn’t any of the mixture on the sides of the pan. I also flick the bread from the corners of the pan into the center using this scraper (there is a certain technique to doing this). If the mixed bread starts to climb up the wall of the bread pan, looking like a giant slug from the movie Dune as directed by David Lynch, I drop a heaping tablespoon of some “thickening” flour (I use rye flour, but others would do) right on top of the “slug.” This should help the bread to form a nice ball which is bounced around in the bread pan. I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than two tbsp of the thickening flour.
