For a variety of reasons including a power outage, yesterday's attempt at honey-oatmeal bread soaked and rose for 21 hours before I got the machine turned on. By that time, it had nearly filled the pan. I had added 2 Tbsp extra liquid to see if I could fix the gnarly top that I got last time, and indeed the top was very smooth, but it just didn't rise very high at all — it made a short, dense, almost gummy loaf. It's okay toasted, but not much better than okay. This was the second attempt at honey-oatmeal bread, my family's mainstay for peanut butter sandwiches.
I don't know why it would have done this — it was almost as though the yeast had spent itself. I mean, that was my unscientific impression. But I think I'm going to stick with 8 hours soaking time. For one thing, since it takes almost 4 hours to bake the bread, that makes for an easy calculation of when the bread will be done: start it now, and it'll be done in 12 hours.
I think we'll be having French toast for a couple of days.
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