BBA Challenge #19 – Marbled Rye

This was an interesting bread for me.  It was one that I was oddly both dreading and looking forward to at the same time. 

Dreading because neither my husband nor I are particularly big fans of rye bread.  I think it’s the caraway seeds that give it a little bit of a dill-type flavor that we don’t really like.  However, I was looking forward to because I now had two mixers and could do both the dark and light doughs at the same time.

Thankfully, though, I emailed our families with my dilemma over making a bread that Mike and I wouldn’t eat and offered to make the bread for anyone else who wanted it.  I had two takers.  Both my mother-in-law and father-in-law like rye bread and would be more than willing to take the loaves off my hands.  So, I proceeded and fired up both the mixers.  It was glorious.

In my efforts to keep costs reasonable and  keep from buying ingredients that I won’t use in other applications, I made the dark rye with espresso powder instead of caramel coloring.  It didn’t come out very dark and I hear that the way to get it really nice and dark is to use the caramel coloring.  *sigh*  Oh well.

 

With one loaf I did the swirl  technique.

With the other loaf, I tried the bull's-eye forming technique.

One thing I learned from both of these techniques is that I think the inner pieces need to be smaller.  I had a hard time wrapping the last piece of light rye around the bull's-eye loaf and the outer piece of the swirl loaf seemed to have a hard time making it around as well.  On one of the loaves, the outer layer was so thin that it even broke under the pressure of a great oven spring.

  I think making the center pieces smaller and outer pieces bigger would help.

I didn’t think I was going to end up with any inside pictures for you, but my father-in-law was kind of enough to take a picture of the loaf I gave him for me. 

Thanks F-I-L!  Hope you enjoyed the bread!

See how the swirl looks a little off?  And while you can tell the difference, I would love for that dark rye to be REALLY dark.

Being that we don’t really like rye bread, I don’t foresee making this bread on a regular basis.  I would, however, like to try it again after I have completed the challenge just to see if I can get the swirl and bull’s-eye to look better.  I would also like to see if I can get the dark rye a little darker by using some caramel coloring, which I will be buying sometime soon as I have some other recipes I would like to use it for.