7 Grain Bread

I've really been wanting mozzarella cheese sticks lately.  So much so that I bought a huge bag of mozzarella sticks yesterday.  However, I was a little aloof and forgot to buy the bread crumbs.  This morning I was distraught when I realized my grocery shopping fail, and to my dismay the little shop across the street is closed on Sundays.  They probably would have charged $10 for a regular sized container, so maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that I couldn't get pre-made bread crumbs.  I wasn't in the mood to walk 20 minutes to go to the grocery store, so I decided to invest way more than 20 minutes into making my own bread for the cheese sticks, which I will hopefully be consuming later on tonight.  Anyway, I whipped open my copy of Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day, and I instantly started paging through looking for the 10 grain bread recipe that I have had my eye on.  Why did I make this bread with 7 grain then?  Because 7 grain was on sale one million weeks ago when I went shopping, whereas 10 grain was not.  Anyway, I'm not sure how this bread will be as a cheese stick breading, but it is pretty tasty just as bread.  Num!  Rating 7/10.

I halved the original recipe, so you can double the ingredients below if you go through a lot of bread.

• 1 cup of 7 grain hot cereal (or 10 grain, if you want to really get a great variety of grains)
• 1 1/2 cuips of white whole wheat flour
• 1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
• 2 1/4 tsp yeast (or one packet)
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/8 cup vital wheat gluten
• 1 3/4 cup lukewarm water

Combine all of the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl.
Add in water slowly until all of the water has been incorporated into the dough.
Cover the bowl (not airtight) and let it rest for two hours.  It can then be transferred to the fridge, if you want to use it on another day.

Assuming that you are baking it now:
Cut off 1 lb of dough from the dough wad (this should be roughly half of the dough, or 1/4 of the dough if you doubled the recipe).
Sprinkle with flour and form into a ball by tucking the dough under the ball and turning the dough as you go.
Stretch it out into an oval and place it on a clean surface/pizza peel/cutting board and cover loosely with saran wrap.  If you didn't refrigerate the dough then let it rest for 40 minutes.  If it has been refrigerated let it rest for 90 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees for 30 minutes with a baking stone and broiler pan inside the oven.
Apply water to the top of the loaf and coat with seeds.  I just used sesame.  Make 1/4 inch deep diagonal slashes across the top with a knife.
Place the loaf onto the baking stone and add 1 cup of hot water into the broiler pan.  Shut the door immediately so that the steam doesn't escape.
Bake for 30 minutes and try to wait for it to cool before you consume a sizable chunk.

Update- this would make great bread crumbs for anything that does not need to actually be breaded.  I had a crazy time trying to get the crumbs to stick to my cheese sticks, so I'll probably just use this recipe for crumbs for things like macaroni and whatnot.   However, this bread is DELICIOUS and oh so crunchy.  I'll be making this often.