This bread is really just delicious. I substituted honey for the sugar, and butter for the shortening and it came out great. You lose the refined sugar and the trans fats that way. It's a really nice, mildly sweet bread that will be great for breakfast-type uses. I also added a little more caraway because this recipe makes FOUR loaves, not two. 12 cups of flour seemed like an awful lot but I diligently followed the recipe, and ended up with a TON of dough. Also, the recipe is missing a key direction: when to add the activated yeast to the other ingredients! I mixed the raisins, flour, and caraway separately. Then I added the yeast to the water/molasses/honey/butter mixture just before adding the flour mixture in parts. So I can recommend doing it that way, because it worked for me!