Hi Ellen,

That’s a very good question, because it shows you understand that rye bread is much more difficult to make than wheat bread.

However, the issue usually isn’t the bread machine; most high-quality machines (and all of the ones in our rankings) are capable of turning out terrific loaves of rye bread, IF you follow the right recipe properly.

The reason it can be difficult is because rye gluten isn’t as strong as wheat gluten.

That means rye dough doesn’t expand as easily, and when it’s run through a normal bread machine it won’t have the same number of air pockets that allow an ordinary loaf of wheat bread to properly rise.

The end product will have the trademark density of rye bread – but without “help” it won’t rise properly in a bread maker, because the mixing process in the machines is designed to work primarily with wheat flour.

The “help” it needs is wheat flour, and that’s why you’ll find that most rye bread recipes for a bread maker have you use both wheat and rye flours.

(We just looked at all of the five-star recipes for bread machines on Google, and all incorporate wheat flour.)

The other alternative is to use a rye bread mix – but if you check the ingredients, you’ll see that those mixes also include wheat flour.

Rye flour needs short, gentle mixing, and G+S has never seen a bread machine designed specifically for that purpose. Using a recipe that includes some wheat flour (along with a bit of trial and error) is the way to go, and you can do that in any of the machines in our rankings.

However, if you like caraway or other seeds in your rye bread, be sure to choose one of the models with an automatic ingredient dispenser.

Good luck!

Lisa

Hi Mary,

Thanks for the question. The best I understand it Granary Flour is actually a registered trade name of Hovis Ltd. The flour is effectively just a malted wheat grain flour, so is brown flour with malted wheat grains added to give it a nutty flavor.

It seems you have a few options…
1) Just look for any malted wheat flour from your local Tesco
2) Buy the Hovis brand from your Tesco online store
3) Or you can actually order the Hovis Granary flour from Amazon online. Just follow this link to Amazon -> https://geni.us/hovisgranaryflour

I hope this helps a little bit.

Kind Regards,
Lisa