My raisin nut bread

Unlike baguettes, which take few ingredients and lots of careful handling and technique, my whole wheat bread with raisins, cinnamon and walnuts has a long list of ingredients and not much technique involved. It’s a big ugly lumpy brown loaf, but it tastes good! It’s rich enough that a single piece toasted, even without butter, is a satisfying and reasonably healthy breakfast. (It’s even better with butter and apricot preserves.)

I started making it for our breakfast toast, years ago, with one of those fussy recipes for “perfect” raisin bread from Cooks Illustrated and a bread machine. I’d freeze half the loaf so it wouldn’t get stale before we could use it all. After a while, I got tired of dragging out all those ingredients only to dump them in the bread machine and have to do it again a week or two later. Besides, I wanted the counter space used by my bread machine for a KitchenAid mixer.

So now I make three loaves at a time, using the mixer for the mixing and kneading. The mixer will only handle one loaf at a time, so I get the first loaf started kneading, then assemble the dry ingredients for the next in a big measuring cup and the wet ingredients in another, ready to dump in when it’s their turn. I stop at three loaves only because I have three bread pans the same size and because I’m not sure four would fit comfortably in my oven.

The recipe has evolved a little from what I originally started with, and it may vary from time to time depending on what I thought I had in the pantry but don’t. I think it originally called for vital wheat gluten, which I no longer bother with because it didn’t seem to make any difference when I made it without.

I sometimes use honey and sometimes brown sugar, and sometimes I leave out the sweetener, cinnamon, raisins and nuts to make a simple whole wheat loaf.

I don’t know what the lemon juice is all about (it was part of the original CI recipe), but I always use it, to keep the dragons away I guess.

Raisin nut bread – 1.5 lb loaf

1 cup lukewarm water
1 large egg, room temperature
3 tablespoons (plus or minus) honey or brown sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
¼ cup nonfat dry milk
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 1/3 cups bread flour
2+ cups whole wheat flour
2 ¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or instant yeast
¾ teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 to 3/4 cup each golden raisins and walnuts

If using active dry yeast, proof it in the water with a little of the honey. If using instant, don’t put it directly on the salt or cinnamon, both yeast killers.

The amount of whole wheat flour required will vary depending on your flour, the humidity and maybe the phase of the moon. You want just enough so that the bread will come together in a smooth shiny ball in the mixer. I usually use about 2.5 cups.

Let the dough rise until double in an oiled or buttered bowl, then form the loaves and let it rise again in the buttered pan (sometimes I just use PAM) while you preheat the oven to 425. When you put the bread in the oven, reduce the temperature to 350 and bake for 40-45 minutes, until it reaches about 205 degrees.

Let it cool for five minutes or so on a rack, then tip it out of the pan to finish cooling.