Multigrain Bread

Today I baked bread. I haven't baked bread in forever, but have mulled over the idea for awhile. For Christmas, Matt gave me a good loaf pan ( I gave him a cast iron griddle). We are exciting, huh? In the spirit of baking things we actually need, I decided to go for it.
We eat whole grain breads and I found a recipe from Cook's Illustrated that sounded like something we would like and be pretty healthy. The idea of a multi grain bread was daunting at first, thinking I had to buy all the individual grains, but this recipe used a 5 grain hot cereal mix. Making the bread was not hard, but definitely time consuming. I started at 11:30 and my loaves weren't completely ready until 5. But there is a lot of down time in making bread, waiting for it to rise and such.
I learned a lot about bread making today. I learned that you actually want your dough a lot wetter and stickier than you think. It will make a softer, less tough bread. I also learned that most yeast breads are finished cooking when they reach 200 degrees on a kitchen thermometer. This is way easier than trying to guess if bread is done. This does not work the same way with quick breads.
My loaves turned out really nice and so much better than I hoped for. Our apartment smelled wonderful and it tasted so good. So good that I would have loved a big slice with lots of butter. But, alas, the diet, so I just tasted. Mitchell loved it too! This actually is very comparable in the nutritional content to the bread we usually buy, so we will use this for everyday use. Matt is already planning on the next batch. Guess he likes it ; ).