#4: Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread

In The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Peter Reinhart has an extraordinary recipe for Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Bread that I've been making for several years. This is a wonderful, rich bread that stands on its own, or, that can be used to make an astonishing pain perdu. (I strongly recommend the recipe from America's Test Kitchen.) This bread is one of my all-time favorites.

So, when I bought a copy of Whole Grain Breads, the Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread was one of the first recipes I made. I've use this recipe to make both loaves of cinnamon bread and cinnamon rolls.

This is certainly a recipe that you can do variations on. For example, I often add nuts along with the cinnamon sugar prior to rolling up the loaf. An I've been known to augment or replace the raisins with dried cranberries or dried cherries. This time around, I went back and made the basic loaf using half the dough. (This is the bread on the right in the photo.) With the other half of the dough, I made a minor variation (shown on the left). After flattening the dough and dusting with cinnamon sugar, I added walnut before rolling the dough into a loaf. Also, when I took the loaf from the oven, I brushed it with butter and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top, a suggestion from The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

This transitional recipe produces a very nice loaf of bread. The dough was shaggy and a bit harder to work with than most. The cooked loaf, while not what I would call dense, was substantial and chewy. The flavor is excellent and is almost as good any cinnamon bread that you are likely to find, whole grain or otherwise. Almost. In this case, Chef Reinhart has set the bar too high with his original recipe. And, compared to the original, this new loaf just doesn't quite measure up.