Baked Goods

Here's the recipe I use 'most every week - it makes having a bread machine worthwhile - even if I don't use it for much else :-)

This versatile bread dough can be used to make pizza crust, French or Italian bread, as well as Middle Eastern breads like pita. My father learned the recipe from one of his biology students.

I've spent years developing my challah recipe. Success with bread recipes are highly dependent on elevation, ambient temperature and humidity. (Quality of ingredients matters too.) For your reference, I live at sea level with generally cool temperatures and high humidity. You may need to adjust your rising time, amount of liquid, use of gluten, etc. to suit your locale. If you are short on time, you can reduce the kneading time and omit the first rise, but this will affect the crumb and it may not rise as high. Regarding gluten - I find it gives me a much better rise, but you can certainly make challah without it.

There is nothing remotely unique about this zucchini bread. You will find thousands of variations on it all over the internet. There's a reason it's a classic - it freezes well and tastes fantastic. I put "freezes well" before "tastes fantastic" for a reason... a reason that anyone who has ever acted on the "Oh what the heck, let's plant zucchini this year" impulse knows by heart. When you wind up with 15 lbs. of zucchini in a single weekend, you invariably wind up using up some of it to make zucchini bread. And once you've given all your friends, family, and neighbors their loaf (or 2), you wind up freezing the rest and eating it in February. I was told that what makes this particular version of zucchini bread freeze well is that it uses oil, not butter. Because oil is less likely to be solid at cool temperatures, it goes through fewer solid/liquid/solid cycles than butter does under similar circumstances, which means it just holds up better to freezing in general. Don't know that it's true, but I do know this version tastes just great after a stint in the freezer. It also has the grace to be pareve, which means you can foist it on people after any sort of meal.

This recipe has been up on this website for oh... at least 20 years. When i wrote the original, I was new to bread baking. I'm no master baker now, by any means, but I've made decades worth of challah and raisin walnut wheat bread, so I have a little more experience. So when I decided to make a rye loaf recently, I looked at the recipe and grew a bit suspicious about it... it did not seem ideal. The version below has been adjusted, and is current as of summer 2026. It bears mentioning that 1) there are two general categories of rye breads, and that 2) rye itself contains no gluten. The two types of rye: there is a 100% (or nearly so) rye bread, which produces a dense, moist, dark crumbly bread that often includes a sourdough starter. Then there's the type of rye bread you get when you order a "hot pastrami on seeded rye with brown mustard, the way God intended." That sort of rye often has a cornmeal crust, and has quite a bit of wheat flour mixed in with the rye. This is known as a "deli" rye, and that's what this recipe is. Because rye contains no gluten, but does contain a group of polysaccharides known as pentosans, it works with water very differently than wheat-based flours. When exposed to water, rye flour gets gummy and tacky, and does not have the long-strand structure of gluten to allow it to form air bubbles in the dough. You'll notice that I have you use a 4:1 ratio of wheat bread flour to rye, and I have you adding gluten on top of that. All that wheat and the added gluten allow the rye loaf to rise, while still having the flavor of deli rye. That said, it does not knead at all like an all-wheat dough. It's stiff and dense, and is tiring to knead. If you add water to make it looser, the dough will be a sticky mess, and it will spread sideways instead of rising. That said, it's possible that you may need a tinch more water... if the dough tears instead of kneading or does not come together well, you can add a teaspoon of water after at least 5 minutes of kneading. You can do this 2 more times for a total of 3 extra teaspoons of water, but beyond that, if you add more water, you'll likely make something that looks more like what would happen if a flatbread and a deli rye loaf loved each other very much. This recipe is for a 1 1/2 lb. loaf.

For breadmachines or Kitchenaid mixer