Cinnamon Raisin Boules July 9-10, 2020

Recipe: The inspiration behind this recipe came from my middle and high schools years when I would often eat cinnamon raisin bread and cream cheese sandwiches for breakfast on my way to school. To get started on my sourdough version of this nostalgic bread I searched for a recipe to base mine off of and found this Baked – the blog recipe. Because the blog post for this recipe gave a lot of suggestion for customization I took stock of ingredients that I had on hand and landed with the following recipe. 70% bread flour, 20% whole wheat flour, and 10% dark rye flour. Followed by 21% levain (Mortimer), 2.2% salt, 16g cinnamon (added during mixing of dough), and 250g raisins. As with the previous recipe, I decided to forgo autolysing the flour for this recipe.

Bulk Fermentation: 5.25 hours at room temperature with 3 sets of stretch and folds. Raisins added during second set of stretch and folds after 35 minutes of soaking in water w/ 1.5 caps of pure vanilla extract added. Followed by preshaping, a 30 minute rest and final shaping into boules. Overnight Retard/Proof: 18 hours  Baked 25 minutes covered and 25 minutes uncovered @ 450F.

Techniques Used: While the recipe that I was loosely following called for adding the salt, cinnamon, and raisins after a 40 minute autolyse and before the first set of stretch and folds. I decided to add the raisins during the second set of stretch and folds like I did for my olive/black pepper/lemon zest boule (see above).

Results: Flavorwise both boules came out tasting great. However, due of the added sugar from the raisins and my not significantly changing my heat deflection technique (see previous recipe). The more well caramelized portions of the bottom crust at times added a somewhat bitter quality to the taste. Appearance-wise my scoring didn’t turn out as planned, but turned out attractive nonetheless. Change for the next time that I bake this recipe: I will definitely add the raisins and cinnamon as instructed by the recipe that I was following in order to better distributed the raisins between and within each of the two the loaves.

For more pictures of these loaves and all of my sourdough recipes click on the ‘Sourdough Baking Journal’ page above.