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Who doesn’t like toast?

seriously, have you ever met a person that doesn’t like toast. and, frankly my guess is if you have - we wouldn’t like him very much. you see toast is one of those great american

Holly shit - the more you search on toast, the stranger it gets. a quick google search proves artists are nutty about toast….s been a while since I have posted a yeast bread recipe. This isn’t because I haven’t been baking them, however. I have simply been sticking to old favorites for a while, like Sourdough and Country White Bread, and have been working on a new baguette recipe that I really like (not ready for prime time yet, sorry!). What this all boils down to is that I have been in a bit of a rut and was finally kicked out of it by a box of cinnamon raisin granola. The granola was so good that after running through a box of it for breakfast (and snacks), I decided that I needed to make some cinnamon raising bread for toasting in the morning as a replacement.
Cinnamon and raisins obviously played a role in the bread, and I went for a fairly plain loaf, rather than doing the slightly more traditional cinnamon spiral. Since granola is a whole-grain product, I also decided to go with whole wheat in my bread. I used both whole wheat flour and white whole wheat flour, as I wanted to maximize the amount of whole grain in the bread but didn’t want the texture to be too coarse, which can be a fault of whole wheat-only breads. I used honey, instead of regular sugar, to add some sweetness to the bread, and I used both buttermilk and butter to ensure that the finished loaf had a hint of a buttery taste to it. The buttery taste is a good feature in bread meant for toasting.
All in all, the bread turned out to be very satisfying. It wasn’t too heavy or dense because I gave the bread a long time to rise a develop small air pockets as the yeast did its thing. The final loaf also had the tenderness that the relatively low gluten (lower than regular flour, anyway) whole wheat flour provides. The cinnamon was mild in the untoasted bread, but came out beautifully in the finished product. I wish now that I would have tried a few slices of french toast with the loaf, but the call of the toaster was just too tempting and just about every single slice ended up there.
Butter, jam and peanut butter (not necessarily together) are my top three toppers for toast made with this bread, but use whatever strikes your fancy. But be sure to toast it. It’s well worth it

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 11:05 am and is filed under