"anthony" > wrote in message
oups.com...
> HI there
> I bake in a relatively high altitude of 1000 metres or more than 3000
> feet (Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia).

I'm at ~1100m (~3600') in Calgary in a very dry climate.

> It took me some adjustment to cope with the higher altitude than I was
> used to, but I finally found that baking at 140 degrees Celsius for

That's awfully low - do you mean 240C?

> around 35 minutes produced a perfect loaf. I'm using 2 cups of hard
> baker's flour to 1.5 cups of mixed-grain.

A few years ago, after baking bread for over 25 years, I experienced failure
after failure. I decided to go back to basics and got out the baking books
and followed a basic recipe to the letter. Result? A perfect loaf.
I think that over time, one can become sloppy or experience "recipe drift"
(especially if you use cup-measure rather than weighing your ingredients)and
it might be worthwhile your going back to first principles. I suggest that
you weigh out 500g of bread flour (no additions of other stuff), 325ml (or
grams) of water, add 2tsp of salt and use 2tsp of instant yeast (or
equivalent). This is a basic recipe for a 65% hydration loaf which should
work with hard wheatflour (that's what I'm used to here). If this produces
a decent loaf (and it should) you can then start fiddling with the flour
proportions.
You can also look at:
http://planeguy.mine.nu/bread/index....on=faq&page=88

If you have any problems with bread, post on alt.bread.recipes where you
will get stacks of advice.
HTH
Graham