I baked whole Grain Pumpkin Bread on Tuesday, using the recipe at Nebraska Kitchen that Lemon Poppy originally put on the Baking Circle. Ever since I needed to give up most butter, it has been my go-to recipe. I usually substitute in a cup of barley flour, but since Bob’s Red Mill may have discontinued it, I am rationing the barley flour, so I used whole wheat pastry flour instead. As always, I reduce the sugar to 1 ¾ cups, and I follow Lemon Poppy’s suggestion to use half buttermilk and oil. I also decided that it would be best in five rather than six 3x6-inch pans, and that worked well. The pumpkin I used was from three years ago; clearly it got lost in the freezer.
My other baking project on Tuesday was to satisfy my yearning for a cinnamon swirl bread with raisins that I can eat with breakfast, and on which my husband can snack. I have a recipe for Oatmeal-Cinnamon Raisin Bread that came from The Baking Sheet (Spring 1999), pp. 24-25. I proceeded to make a lot of changes. I used half whole wheat flour and half bread flour and added 1 Tbs. special dry milk and 1 Tbs. flax meal. I substituted in 1 cup of buttermilk. I cut the brown sugar to 3 Tbs. and used 2 ½ Tbs. olive oil in place of the butter. I used 1 ¾ tsp. yeast. Instead of oats, I used a generous ½ cup of Bob’s Red Mill Muesli, which I soaked in the buttermilk. The dough seemed slightly dry, so I added 1 tsp. water as it kneaded in the bread machine. I added 1/3 cup golden raisins. For the filling, I had some sugar and cinnamon (what I had forgotten to put into a recipe a few weeks ago), so I used it, then spritzed it before rolling up the dough into a loaf. I chose an 8x4 USA loaf pan. Both rises took 80 minutes. I moved the containers to the front room where it was warmer. The loaf was not done after 35 minutes of baking at 375F. It needed another ten minutes. I did tent with foil after the first 25 minutes, and the crust still got a bit darker than I wanted, It’s cooling now, and I will have a slice at breakfast.
This dough fit in the small 2-quart dough bucket, but Italian Cook is correct that some breads, like the wheat rye bread I baked on New Year's Eve, do better with a 4-qt.
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