Saturday Share: Multi-Grain Bread

Last week, a new couple dropped by our house. The first thing they said was, “Oh, that smells wonderful. What is it?”

I told them that it was the multi-grain bread baking in the bread machine.

They were awestruck.

To us it was no big deal. We bake a loaf of some kind of bread at least once a week.

Why We Bake Our Bread

We told the couple that we hadn’t bought bread in more than 3 years. I went on to tell them we’d watched a couple of documentaries that changed the way we eat. One was about genetically-modified wheat aka short stalk wheat and the spraying of wheat fields with glysophate starting a couple of decades ago.

Many Regenerative Medicine doctors attribute the rise in auto-immune diseases to glysophate entering the food chain. Some think people aren’t actually gluten-intolerant. They are modified-wheat/glysophate intolerant.

Anyway, the other documentary was about the magical combination of air, water, fire, and earth to create food that’s sustained the human animal for millennia. In that one, bread was discussed at length.

Bread is made from basically flour, water, yeast, and a smidgen of sugar, salt, and fat. At the most, that’s 7 ingredients.

The loaf of bread you buy at the store is made from approximately 42 ingredients. 7 versus 42? What are the other 35 ingredients? Various chemicals you probably can’t pronounce.

What We Did

We brought the bread baking machine out from the cupboard, bought organic flour from strains that have been grown for centuries, and started baking our own bread. The machine makes it easy.

My hubby took the old machine to our other house when he went to stay for a couple of weeks while he did some projects there so I bought a bigger one for our home in town.

My hubby is as proficient as I in baking bread. Normally, we make a French bread that is out of this world. For a breakfast bread, I sometimes make Cranberry Pecan bread.

Now, I’m making a multi-grain bread that is so good it’s insane. That’s the recipe I’m sharing with you today. It makes a 1 and 1/2 pound loaf which is about 10-12 slices.

Joan’s Bread Machine Multigrain Loaf

1 1/4 cups of water 78 to 85 degrees F.
2 tablespoons soft butter
1 1/3 cups organic bread flour
1 1/3 cups organic whole wheat flour
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/8 cup flax seed meal
1/8 cup chopped pistachio or other nuts
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
3 tablespoons of honey or brown sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons bread machine yeast

1. Place the ingredients into the bread machine pan according to your machine’s directions.
2. Select Whole Wheat Cycle
3. Select Medium Crust Color
4. Push the On button.
5. When the bread is finished baking, take it out and let it cool about 15 minutes—if you can wait that long. In all honestly, we slice a piece off immediately. It just smells too good not to eat it hot from the baker.

That’s it. It’s that easy to make a delicious loaf of bread. We’ve had our newer machine about 3 years. Ordered it from Amazon because of low price number of positive reviews. It was a good choice.

Takeaway Truth

It takes maybe 5 minutes for us to put a loaf on to bake. If you try it, the first time will take you longer. Be sure you use a food thermometer to test the water temperature and just follow the instructions in the manual that comes with your machine.