100% wholemeal cinnamon swirl

It was Cedele that first introduced my family to cinnamon swirl bread. Before Cedele, we had had our favourite sticky buns from a bakery next to Cold Storage Jelita, and cinnamon raisin buns from Delifrance, but never swirly cinnamon in breakfast-type bread. My mother enjoyed Cedele's cinnamon swirl a lot, but rarely bought it because of her preference for wholemeal over white flour.

My successful 100% wholemeal bread must have given her some confidence in my baking skills, because after she finished that loaf, she requested for 100% wholemeal cinnamon swirl bread.

Peter Reinhart has a specific receipe for whole wheat cinnamon raisin bread in his book Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. But I decided to try it on his 100% wholemeal bread receipe instead, with the same modifications I had made to the previous loaf.

Further modifications were:

- Instead of using rice bran oil as used in the previous two loaves, I used my precious Purity Farm Organic Ghee from pastured cows that I shipped in from the US. The reasons were that pastured cows' milk contains more CLA than grain fed cows' milk, and CLA is a great antioxidant and essential fatty acid. Additionally, pastured fed cow products have an Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio of 3:1, whereas the ratio of grain fed cow products is 20:1. We should support farms which produce organic whole foods, and cow farms whose cows are pastured. Lastly, I wanted to see how the bread would turn out if I used ghee / butter instead of oil.

- An additional 10g of water to the biga by accident.

This time, the loaf turned out much more wet, and I had to constantly wet my hands so that the dough would not stick to them. I could not add more wholemeal flour to the bread because I had run out of it. Rolling the dough up after spreading eggwash and cinnamon on its surface was a challenge because of its gloopiness.

But finally two rolls were done, and I put them in a baking tin to see if they would form nice peaks upon rising. I applied eggwash before the final rise, and then waited. Within half an hour, the two rolls had risen so insanely much that they filled the whole baking tin and merged into each other.

I snipped the tops at a 45 degree angle to see what would happen...

Good oven spring

The snipped bits did not turn the bread into a porcupine,
probably because of the gloopiness of the dough

Nice brown crust from the eggwash

Cross-section

The top half of the bread had nice bigger holes, while the bottom half was a little more dense, but still holey. As you can see, the swirl did not quite work out as a swirl, but at least the cinnamon lines managed to get spread through the bread. The only thing was that I had sprinkled way too little cinnamon on the surface of the dough so that even though there was a nice cinnamon smell when the slices of bread were being toasted, there was little cinnamon taste. 

My mother enjoyed the texture of the bread a lot though. Even though she did not tell me that it was good, a few days later she told her sister that the wholemeal bread was so light that it did not taste like 100% wholemeal. I too think that this loaf tasted more light and fluffy than the previous loaf. So perhaps the combination of an extra 10g of water, ghee, and eggwash made it so.

Perhaps next time I shall try Peter Reinhart's specific receipe, and add much more cinnamon plus honey on the surface of the dough.

Submitted to YeastSpotting