Multigrain bread a holiday treat

It's easy to get lost in the sugar of the season.

But giving in to the baking bug doesn't have to mean an endless parade of cookies, cakes and pies. There are plenty of savory options for getting your hands into some dough and filling your home with "that" scent without necessitating a new pants size by Christmas.

For that, I turn most often to bread. Some people find the prospect of baking bread intimidating; I find it therapeutic. Which is not to say I'm good at it. I almost invariably get distracted, resulting in overrisen dough that sags into a strange, stiff puddle in my oven.

The trick to is find the right recipe, one that produces the sort of bread you love but also is forgiving. Earlier this year I found my perfect bread, a Cook's Illustrated magazine recipe for multigrain sandwich loaf.

The Cook's version of the recipe blends two parts all-purpose flour and one part whole wheat flour with a multigrain hot breakfast cereal. Frankly, that's simply brilliant. My previous multigrain attempts involved buying minute amounts of a dozen grains.

This one-stop shopping approach worked great. The dough rises nicely and produces a bread that is dense enough to feel whole grain but light enough to accommodate sandwich fillings.

And as I discovered one hot day this past summer when I forgot about my dough and let it rise hours longer than it should have, this recipe also is extraordinarily forgiving. In fact, I thought that loaf was among the best I'd ever baked.

Over the months, I've made a few tweaks. I cut the all-purpose flour in half, substituting white whole wheat flour to up the whole grains even more without sacrificing texture or flavor. I also eliminated the pumpkin seeds Cook's called for.

And the original recipe called for melted butter. That seemed a bother, so I've used olive oil successfully every time.

Multigrain hot breakfast cereals come in numerous varieties. Cook's prefers a seven-grain variety, but I found a 10-grain that worked great. Most can be found in the cereal section of grocers' natural food aisles.

MULTIGRAIN BREAD

(Start to finish 3 1/2 hours, 30 minutes active )

1 1/4 cups (6 1/4 ounces) multigrain (such as 7- or 10-grain) hot cereal

2 1/2 cups (20 ounces) boiling water

1 1/2 cups (7 1/2 ounces) all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups (7 1/2 ounces) white whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cups (7 1/2 ounces) whole wheat flour