Hi yes I have used the Bread Machine Yeast in the Challah. They call it rapid rise but it is more like Acitve Dry. Yeast is SO confusing !! This will make 3 braids. There are lots of great YouTube videos of braids. Your DD will love looking at some of them for ideas :) Challah is the perfect bread for grilled cheese sandwiches...never will you find better ! It is also wonderful for French toast and croutons when it gets stale. Bread pudding also. Can't go wrong with Challah. I do have a good whole wheat . I will get it out and type it in. You really need to get your starter going and then make SD with a soaker...that means you take the whole grains and soak them overnight. It accomplishes several things. The most important is that the grains are way more digestible and also you get so much more nutrition from the flours and grains when they interact with the enzymes in the SD and you retard the loaves overnight for the bake the next day. The price for Bob's Red Mill on Amazon is great ! You can also sign up for the regular shipments to save even more. They have the bulk yeast too and all is free shipping. Walmart has the best buttermilk. It is called Bulgarian Buttermilk and has more good bacteria in it . Very thick and wonderful. You can use the powdered or just add vinegar or lemon to milk but it isn't nearly as tasty or thick. I have some great rye breads. Will add those too. Please take a look at Wild Yeast Blog..she has a lot of breads that aren't sourdough also . c

bbstx, don't give up. I did make the no-knead bread (twice, in fact) and just wasn't impressed with flavor or texture, so I went back to traditional bread, but a lot of people love it. I never tried it with beer, that might make a difference in flavor. I don't use a scale for anything, I learned to bake bread by "feel". Even in the bread machine, I'll measure ingredients according to the recipe and then check the dough. Sometimes it needs more flour, sometimes more liquid, depending on the flour, the humidity, many factors. I just made breadsticks last night from a King Arthur recipe which is usually pretty much "right on" and had to add nearly 1/2 cup of water because it was too crumbly. I'm blaming the Gold Medal bread flour I'm stuck with for that. That said, a lot of people use a scale and like that method. I'd still have to check the dough to see if it was "right", LOL, so it would do me no good to weigh the stuff, but if you think that will work for you and you have space to store the thing, I've seen some that weren't too expensive. Annie

I have a KitchenAid, Hobart era. But I use my bread machine for kneading primarily to keep the miles off my KA. On any given weekend, I can buy from one to five slightly used bread machines at rummage sales for from $4-$10. I hardly ever see a KA at rummage & almost never see a Hobart KA. Another good reason to use the bread machine is that I can toss all the ingredients in it & wander off to do other stuff plus not worrying about the mixer walking itself off the counter. (I'm prone to wandering off, like to the garden or laundry room downstairs, & completely forgetting what I had going on in the kitchen!) And, the cleanup w/ the bread machine is just about non-existent. Dough pulls away cleanly from the bucket & any little tidbits left behind will dry & flake off between uses. Downside, of course, is having to store the beast! But if you have room to squeeze one in, I think you'll really enjoy the convenience of have a Bread Machine. The other thing I would suggest is to investigate some of the wonderful recipes for no-knead, almost no-knead breads. I'm including a link to one of my favorite almost no-knead recipes. There's a video on the site that you'll need to watch to get the full instructions on the how to make it--very easy! And the flavor is wonderful. (I drastically cut the am't of salt, from 1 1/2 t. to less than 1/2 t. & the bread still turns out great.) Here is a link that might be useful: Breadtopia

jasdip - there have been a couple of threads posted on the other Forums here concerning the newer KitchenAids and their inability to handle bread dough. The complaint is that the machine is struggling and ultimately the motor gives out. Some posters stated that they were not using more than the amount of flour specified in the owner's manual and they still had trouble. Apparently the gears are still metal but their housing is plastic and that tends to be more vulnerable. The older ones were all metal and that's why they're still working. Which model are you using? Here is a link that might be useful: kitchenaid