The Wood-Fired Blog

Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Oct 08, 2012Posted by Forno Bravo

This Cinnamon Raisin Bread is from Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Bread cookbook, and it came out really well. Peter describes this as a transitional recipe for a bread that lies somewhere between a nice whole wheat bread, and a sticky cinnamon roll. In general, you make a nice soft whole wheat bread using milk and an egg, plus honey, olive oil and cinnamon, and then flatten the dough and cover it with sugar and cinnamon and roll it up. It’s soft, it makes great toast and it’s still pretty healthy.

The Reinhart recipes calls for a long soak of the whole wheat flour, salt, raisins and milk, and a separate Biga pre-ferment with whole wheat flour, milk, oil, egg and yeast — which are combined with the last ingredients to make the final dough. That required one day more of pre-planning than I was ready to make, so I compressed the soaker and the Biga into a single pre-fermentation that I refrigerated over night. I added the ingredients for the final dough the next day and then shaped the loaf.

Next time I am going to add more cinnamon to the dough and a little more sugar and cinnamon before I roll up the loaf — to get a more pronounced swirl.

The loaf in the background is a whole wheat rye loaf with an overnight pre-fermentation. This is really starting to work well, and I’ve got the family on my side at this point. Now I just need to avoid a dense, brick-like meltdown.

 

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