I haven’t been baking very much bread lately, partly because I already have a freezer full of bread, and also because I’ve been carbing it up on all the winter root veg I’ve been getting in my organic box. In truth, I feel better when I’m not eating so much bread. I don’t think it’s a gluten thing, I think it’s a self control thing: when good bread is around, I tend to eat lots of it.

The trouble is, I miss baking. And last week, I really felt like I needed to bake. More than that, I needed to Comfort Bake. I got the idea in my head that I wanted multigrain bread, and of all people, Martha Stewart came to the rescue with her Multigrain Bread recipe which ticked all the right boxes: rye flour, oats, flax seeds, sunflower seeds.

The only substitution I made was to use quinoa rather than bulgur wheat. I could definitely smell and taste the quinoa in the resulting loaf, but I loved it. I also didn’t need as much flour as the recipe called for (I had about a cup leftover), which may be partially due to quinoa not holding as much water as bulgur. This picture makes the crumb look a little, well, crumbly, but I think that’s due to my slicing the bread before it was totally cool.

I loved this bread and will certainly be making it again – with the quinoa. That is, once I get through my freezer stash.

Recipe: Multigrain Bread