Dave,

Out of interest, are you a techie by any chance? A bloke who likes a clear manual with nothing left to chance.

Seriously, all my bread making fell into place once I discovered it was nothing to do with recipes but more to do with feeling underlying principles. I struggled for years, gave up loads of times and my success rates were a lottery. Just like you in fact. But once you think of it with as dealing with living breathing feeling stuff and try to understand how it feels about time, heat, water, handling etc it becomes natural and then it is really easy. It is about having an affinity. It is a bit like driving by either a flow chart set of procedures and instructions or doing it instinctively or naturally and making it second nature. If you do it by instructions and procedures you will always need them. If you instead concentrate on what everything does and why then you really are in control as you experiment and play and learn.

This approach gives much more joy because then you can make anything. pizza, flatbreads, wholemeals, French, brioche etc. .... and it is a genuine learning and creative process rather than following manuals. I just have a suite of basic spreadsheets to just record what I did and then learned and then can adjust for next time.

I'm going on a bit. I'm sorry.