Last Updated on June 11, 2020
When I moved into a new house in 2014, one of the first things I unpacked was my bread machine. I was excited to bake in the new kitchen and settled in making all my favorite loaves.
At first everything went smoothly, but a few weeks later I noticed my hamburger buns were different. The dough had become extremely sticky and hard to handle. The buns still tasted fine, but the texture was off—sticky and a little unpleasant.
Oddly, not all recipes were affected. My sour milk bread continued to look and taste great, while the hamburger buns and some other water-based recipes turned gummy and difficult to shape.
After comparing ingredients, I realized the only consistent difference between the batches that worked and the ones that didn’t was the liquid: some recipes used milk, others used water. That led me to suspect the water itself was the culprit.
My neighborhood water comes from a private well and is normally untreated—no chlorine, no fluoride, just groundwater pumped to the house. However, the local water system had recently undergone maintenance, and the water tower had been treated with chlorine as part of that process.
Chlorine can inhibit yeast activity, so I tested the theory by substituting bottled water for tap water in a batch of hamburger bun dough. The change was immediate: the dough behaved normally and the buns turned out perfectly.
The chlorine in the treated well water was suppressing the yeast, causing sticky, under-risen dough in recipes that relied on water rather than milk. Once the municipal treatment was finished and chlorine levels returned to normal, I switched back to tap water without further problems.
If you bake with a bread machine and encounter suddenly sticky dough or poor rise, consider whether your water has changed. Chlorinated water can reduce yeast performance; using filtered or bottled water for a short time can confirm the cause and restore consistent results.