“Don’t put me back in the fridge,” MzElla said.

MzElla is my sourdough starter. Sourdough starters are named to remind us that they are alive. The wild yeast within that starter are active, living, hungry microorganisms.

I already had a loaf of bread out to be eaten so it was either the fridge for MzElla or an experiment.

This experiment, following the one with the Chia seeds, was to make a cinnamon raisin bread using the same sourdough process that I’ve been using.

I had a vision of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to adapt the process to add raisins. It was just a matter of trying it and waiting to see whether it turned out. 

I used the same recipe that I have used for my sourdough over the past month or so, following Elaine Boddy’s method in “The Sourdough Whisperer” book.

I did the stretch and fold for three times as usual and then I did the experiment.

This morning, I took out the bread dough, put it into a cold oven, and I baked it for an hour and I waited.

First of all, because, yesterday, I had put my dough in the oven with the oven light on, to try and help the dough rise (my kitchen is so cold - too cold for processing dough) the dough was healthy and really flourished in the warm environment.

Coming out of the oven, it was a lovely, beautiful big loaf of bread. You could see the raisins in the scoring area at the top of the bread. It looked pretty.

Next was the taste test. I waited an hour and then cut into it.  it was very soft because it had risen so well and there wasn’t a lot of cinnamon raisin flavor, although it was definitely there, and it was definitely a cinnamon raisin loaf.

When I try this again, I will do the stretch and fold with the cinnamon and raisins, at least three times to really get lots of layers into the bread. 

And that is all that I would change because it went really well and it was tasty. 

I called that a win. 
- Debbie