Last Updated on June 11, 2020

I moved to a new house in 2014.  You can bet that one of the first things I unpacked was my bread machine! I happily began making bread in my new kitchen.

However, a few weeks later, I noticed that my hamburger buns weren’t turning out quite right.  The dough was incredibly sticky and really unpleasant to handle.  The buns tasted fine, but the texture was a little strange.

The first few batches I’d made at the new house were normal, but suddenly no matter what I did they weren’t quite right.

I was having no problems at all with my sour milk bread.  The bread tasted and looked great.

Why was I only having problems sometimes?

I couldn’t figure it out at first.  The flour and yeast were the same.  The only actual difference was the liquid. One recipe used milk and the other used water.

That was the answer! The problem was the water!

My neighborhood gets its water from a well.  The water is usually untreated.  No chlorine.  No fluoride.  There are no additives.  It’s just water pumped out of the ground.

However, the system had undergone annual maintenance.  As a part of that, the water tower was treated with chlorine.  I realized that the chlorine in the water must have been killing the yeast.  

I proved my theory by buying some bottled water and using that in the recipe instead.  Yep! The hamburger buns came out perfectly!

The problem persisted for about a month.  After that, I switched back to using tap water in my bread machine recipes.