Whole Wheat Cinnamon Raisin Bread

In an attempt to make something a little sweeter (again from my trusted Reinhart book), I tried making a classic – cinnamon raisin bread with a cinnamon sugar swirl in the middle. Different from other sweet breads (like pumpkin bread) in that it still uses yeast to rise instead of baking powder, and the bread is also drier than other sweet breads, less cake like. And though it is sweet, it isn’t nearly as sweet cinnamon buns (it’s cousin with far more sugar…). Making the bread itself is more involved than other breads I have made due to it containing more ingredients, specifically more ingredients in the soaker and biga, than anything I have made before. It is also the first bread I have made that included an egg (which I added to the biga). And yes, it is made from 100% whole-wheat flour.

Overall the bread turned out perfectly, tasting great both freshly sliced and toasted with butter. Truly it is a great bread to try once you have become experienced with baking other simpler breads. Overall I stuck pretty close to the recipe, though I substituted brown sugar for the regular sugar in the swirl, and I added walnuts, both of which turned out to be great options. I also, once again, used dried milk. The only issue that came about was that I was not able to get the raisins to distribute evenly throughout the loaf so they ended up predominantly on the outside of the bread.

Difficulty: difficult

From: Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor.