I decided to make a multigrain bread next. The whole wheat was good, but a little boring. I’m following the recipe for Multigrain Struan and there isn’t a specific combination of grains suggested. I went with steel-cut oats, millet, quinoa, amaranth, flax seeds, and sesame seeds. The steel-cut oats, millet, and quinoa needed to be precooked to soften them up. I cooked the millet and quinoa together, 2 tbsp of each simmered with 1/2 cup of water until the water was absorbed. Then I cooked about 1/4 cup of the oats with 3/4 cup water for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. The recipe calls for 6 ounces total of any combination of grains, and my cooked grains ended up weighing more than that (between 7 and 8 ounces). I used about 5 ounces of the grains I’d cooked, then added flax seeds, amaranth, and sesame seeds to bring it up to 6 ounces.

The grains are mixed with 2 ounces of whole wheat flour, 6 ounces milk, and 1/2 tsp salt.

My resulting mixture is much thinner than my last soaker. I wonder if the partially cooked oats had too much extra moisture in them. Hopefully they’ll absorb a lot of the liquid. All the grains I used were pretty coarse, so that probably has something to do with it too. I guess I’ll just need more flour in the final dough.

My last loaf started to get moldy a couple days ago. I’ve noticed that homemade bread never lasts long enough for me to go through it all, so I’ve decided to make two smaller, free-form loaves this time and freeze one of them.