"Allan Adler" > wrote in message
...
>
> I don't have any recipes for baking bread with a microwave oven.
> I think microwaves ovens are not interchangeable, so a recipe from
> a book with one microwave in mind might not work on another.
>
> So far, I've been improvising. I tried just mixing some flour, water
> and baking soda and putting it right in the microwave. If I simply let
> it cook for a couple of minutes at full power, it gets all hard and dried
> out and looks somewhat burned. If I cook it at the lowest possible power,
> it dries out much more slowly and never seems to burn but also never seems
> to quite cook. To deal with that last problem, I've let it cook for 1
minute
> at full power. I've tried making rolls and small loaves and have obtained
> results that I'm not sorry about having eaten but which don't really
> seem like bread. They are quite dense. I'm hoping to do better once I
> can let the dough rise, but I really need to have some rational way to
> think about using the microwave for this.
>
> I might be able to get some a few from the manufacturer, and maybe they
> will suffice, but it would be nice to be able to go beyond that.

First of all, if you are mixing flour, water and baking soda you are not
making what most people would recognize as bread. It might be a quick bread
or a cracker or just nasty. Without any acid, the baking soda will not
produce CO2, so technically, you don't have any leavening. Bread (without
any qualifiers like quick bread or flat bread) is a yeast raised product,
not a chemically leavened product. I would recommend that you go to a
bookstore and get a cookbook on microwave cooking. Large bookstores have
sections labeled "appliance cooking." That's where you would find the book.
There will be a discussion about various ovens, power levels, etc. I would
also suggest that you get a basic text on cooking such as Julia Child's "The
way to Cook" or an equivalent text that has information on basic techniques.
Finally, I don't think that you will be able to get any decent bread from a
conventional microwave. Since there is no radiant heat, there is no
browning. Browning not only contributes to the appearance of the baked
good, but also to the flavor and texture. Newer microwaves combine radiant
heat with microwave energy and yield better results than pure microwave
cooking. I love my convection microwave, but even it doesn't do as good a
job on bread on the mix setting (microwave + convection heat) as on the
convection bake setting (convection only).