Raisin bread for me was one of those foods that I forgot how much I enjoyed it because I never buy it.  When My mom had came up for a few weeks leading up to the birth of my daughter bringing with her a loaf of raisin bread I rediscovered what had been missing from my breakfast and lunch routine.  It felt odd to me to be eating store-bought raisin bread, even though it was delicious, when I make my everyday bread at home from scratch. I looked at the ingredients in the raisin bread and was reminded of why I prefer to make my own bread and decided to try my hand at raisin bread. I mean I’ve been making my own bread for over a year now how hard could it be to make raisin bread? Initially It proved harder than I was expecting.  The bread my mom bought had a cinnamon swirl and I wanted my bread to have a cinnamon swirl. After the second proof, I rolled out my bread dough, sprinkled some cinnamon on it, rolled it like a cinnamon roll and placed it in the bread pan. Now when I put the bread in the oven it looked ok.  When I took it out the oven, I was still hopeful. When I took it out the pan I realized the bread was oddly hard. To this day I really don’t know what went wrong. I sliced it and the taste was ok, but the bread looked like a roll, it didn’t really get its bread shape. The raisin bread experiment was a total fail. I was frustrated but didn’t want to waste it. I figured I would eat it again as I put it in the fridge. I didn’t think about it again for several weeks when I threw it away.

A few weeks later after feasting on slice after slice of the raisin bread my mom would buy at the market I decided to give making raisin bread another try.  I realized the one thing that went wrong with the first attempt was trying to make the bread look like the store bought bread instead of just trying to make a yummy loaf of bread. My best friend had given me a established sourdough starter and I made whole wheat sourdough raisin bread.  I have a standard recipe I use for my whole wheat sandwich bread that I get from 8-Ingredient Whole Wheat Bread (Soft & Hearty) – Sally’s Baking Addiction. I tweaked that recipe and replaced the yeast with a cup of sourdough starter and omg that raisin bread was so good! It was lightly sweet with a little but not too much tang. I wrote down how I did it and was looking forward to testing out the recipe again.  Unfortunately, I left my sourdough starter out when we left for vacation for the 4^th of July and when I came home found mold in my sourdough starter.

I starter a new sourdough starter and when It was time to discard some decided to try and make a sourdough discard whole wheat raisin bread. I used the same base recipe as before but since I had over a cup and half of discard I just added less flour and water to make up the difference. Since my starter is still a baby and not strong enough to raise the bread on its own I kept the yeast in the recipe.  Now I know better than to start bread in the middle of the day.  Starting bread later in the day means staying up late until it’s done baking. Baking something was on my to-do list for the day and I missed having raisin bread in the house. what this led to however was the bread needed to go in the oven during my toddler’s bedtime. I asked my husband to put the bread in oven on 350 for 35 minutes while I got the her to sleep. When I came downstairs and pulled it out of the oven my bread was dark , not burnt dark but definitely a few steps above sun kissed. I looked at the oven and saw my husband had put the bread on 360 instead of 350. Even though it was a little dark it was still really good!

Raisin bread is now becoming a staple in my house. I plan to make it once a month.  Now I am still working on my recipe for raisin bread but if you want to try your hand at it its fairly simple. Use the link above and use that recipe. When it comes to adding the butter and honey also add a cup of raisins, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and a half a cup of sugar.  Do that and you will make some simple and yummy raisin bread. If you want to make sourdough raisin bread substitute the yeast for a half a cup to a cup sourdough starter.  Good luck on your raisin breads, if you decide to try it out!  I’m about to go cut two slices of raisin bread and toast it with some butter and pour me a cup of coffee.