Last Updated on June 11, 2020
I moved into a new house in 2014, and one of the first things I unpacked was my bread machine. I was excited to start baking in my new kitchen and quickly dove into recipes I’d used for years.
At first everything seemed fine, but a few weeks later I noticed something odd: my hamburger buns were coming out with very sticky, hard-to-handle dough. The buns tasted okay, but the texture felt off. The first batches I made in the new house had been normal, then suddenly the dough was consistently gummy no matter what I adjusted.
Curiously, the problem wasn’t universal. My sour milk bread continued to bake up beautifully—good rise, fine texture, no issues. That contrast made me look for differences between the recipes. Flour and yeast were the same; the one clear difference was the liquid: one recipe used milk, the other used water.
That was the clue. The tap water in my neighborhood comes from a well and is typically untreated—no chlorine, no fluoride, just groundwater. But the local water system had recently undergone annual maintenance, and the water tower had been chlorinated as part of that process. I realized the chlorine in the tap water was likely affecting the yeast and ruining the dough’s texture.
To test the idea, I bought bottled water and used it in the hamburger bun recipe. The result was immediate: the buns came out perfectly when made with bottled water. The sticky, unpleasant dough disappeared.
The chlorine-related issue lasted only about a month while the treatment was in effect. After that period, I returned to using tap water in my bread machine recipes without further trouble.
This experience reminded me that small changes in water quality can have a big impact on yeast-based baking. If you suddenly encounter sticky or poorly-risen dough, consider whether water treatment or additives could be affecting your results—switching to a neutral bottled or filtered water for a test can help identify the problem quickly.