Kitchen Sink Bread

This recipe is for “Kitchen Sink” bread. I have a Hamilton-Beach bread machine now; I wanted to make this bread from my old Black & Decker manual/recipe book which requires Seven Grain Cereal, but I didn’t have any of that. Instead, I had a cupboard full of bags of stuff where I would buy something to use a tablespoon or two of in some bread, but I would never finish the bag.

This recipe is the cousin of another recipe uploaded recently (November 2022) to a Facebook bread machine group which is based on one of Killer Dave’s breads which contains a lot of seeds.

Here is the recipe:

1⅔ cups of water – I heat this up in the microwave using a Pyrex measuring cup for around 30 seconds and dump this into the bread pan. If you think the temperature is too hot, by the time all the ingredients are in the pan, it will be OK, trust me. If your bread machine warms up the liquid at the beginning, you don’t need to do this business with the microwave.

3 TBSP of powdered milk

2 TBSP of shortening (I use vegetable or olive oil)

2 TBSP of honey

2 tsp of salt

1¼ cup of whole wheat flour in Canada; in the USA, use 1 cup of whole wheat flour

2½ cups of bread flour in USA; in Canada, use 2½ cups of all-purpose or bread flour

At this point you are supposed to add ¾ cups of Seven Grain Cereal, but ¾ cups is equivalent to 12 TBSP, so add 12 TBSP of different things. For example: cracked wheat, corn meal, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds (unsalted), sunflower seeds (unsalted), white sesame seeds, black sesame seeds, triticale flakes, hemp hearts, oats, “healthy” cereal (in Canada, Red River), different types of flour (spelt, triticale, tapioca, rye, etc.). If you don’t have 12 different things, then double up some items so you would have 2 TBSP of some things out of the total 12.

1¼ tsp of yeast (I use bread machine yeast)

Use the Whole Grain or Whole Wheat setting, this recipe is for a 2 lb. loaf. On my machine, there is no option to choose the crust, you may be able to select something here.

On my machine, the bread is first mixed with a chunka-chunka sound (about 2 minutes), and then it is mixed really well, with the blade going non-stop for about 13 minutes. After the non-stop action starts, I open up the machine, and using a plastic scraper, make sure there isn’t any of the mixture on the sides of the pan. I also flick the bread from the corners of the pan into the center using this scraper (there is a certain technique to doing this). Don’t just dump ingredients in the machine and come back 3 hours later, you have to be proactive.

If the mixing bread starts to climb up the wall of the bread pan, I drop a heaping TBSP of some “thickening” flour (I use rye flour, but others would do) right on top of it. This should help the bread to form a nice ball which is bounced around in the bread pan. I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than two TBSP of the “thickening” flour.

I have made this bread many times, never had a flop!