I've made this recipe for many years, and I always add raisins. It's a delicious loaf. My question here is, why not add the raisins in during the last minute or so of kneading, as I have always done in my Kitchen Aid Mixer? The original recipe for "Oatmeal Toasting and Sandwich Bread" calls for adding optional raisins during the last three minutes of kneading. I understand that adding them at the beginning, with all the other ingredients would lead to major sugar leaching, but would that still happen if you do it at the last minute? Today I tried kneading in the raisins after the first rise, and found this to be quite difficult. I have tried this method before, and what I usually get is lots of clumps of raisins on the inside, and a significant number of raisins on the outside which really do NOT like to be poked in. I very carefully spread the dough somewhat, and made sure that the raisins were not all stuck together. I found that the only way to get them in there was to really knead, nothing "gentle" about it. I wish you would do a post about this, or make a video of how to accomplish this. In the meanwhile, I'm going back to my old method. It seems to work just fine.

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