Multigrain Bread

French bread is awesome, but sometimes you want a loaf bread. There’s a ton of different types out there. I’m just starting to make some forays in the bread realm, and this book is a great bread baking primer:

The multigrain bread recipe in here isn’t perfect—it makes a small loaf. Sometimes I double the recipe and split it among 3 loaf pans to get a larger loaf. But since I hadn’t made this in a while, I figured I’d just make a single batch to make sure I still had the multigrain mojo.

It calls for a soaker of cornmeal, wheat bran, and rolled oats that soaks overnight in about ¼ C of water. Then it’s added the next day to bread flour, yeast, honey, brown sugar, cooked brown rice, salt, water, and buttermilk. I didn’t have buttermilk so I mixed yogurt with milk to get something of a similar consistency.

Mix it up and knead it until it’s pliant, sprinkling in more bread flour as needed.



Then let it rise. Form into loaves in greased loaf pans and let them rise again.



Then bake in a 350F oven for 30-40 min, rotating pans after the first 20. Once they’ve baked up golden brown, tap them to make sure they sound hollow. Take ‘em out, depan and cool on a cooling rack.



The crumb came out pretty good, and it had a mellow crunch to the crust. It makes great toast—probably because of the grains and the honey and brown sugar, it browns up really nicely. I bet it’ll make good BLTs, even though the bread is on the small side.