Rye Swirl Bread

Since I've now finished my Julie & Julia trip through Daniel Leader's "Local Breads" I will now make breads on a whim, choosing from any of the books I have, online recipes I've saved, or recipes people have given me.  It's not that I didn't do this before, but now there's just 'no next recipe in the book' to move on to.  That said, there are plenty I will make on a regular basis - pain au levain (must have made this about a million times), Auvergne dark rye, blue cheese and rye loaves, alpine baguettes . . . . . so many wonderful breads to revisit.  Then there are all the yeasted ones I glossed over that I'd like to remake using sourdough.  So much bread, so little time!

Anyway, while leafing through my bread books (Dean Brettshneider's book "Global Baker") this loaf immediately caught my eye - such a spectacular looking crumb!  So sort of make it I did.  Well when I say sort of, I used the basic idea in the recipe, but not the recipe itself.  For starters the recipe is yeasted, 2nd it had molasses it in which I don't particularly like (well that said, I had one bad experience with back-strap molasses and haven't gone back, but maybe I just need to try again), and it also used caraway which my friends don't particularly like.  So I used the same recipe I made last week (Polish cottage rye), and split the dough in two.

Mr Brettschneider's recipe made two batches of dough (200g of flour in each) essentially the same, except the dark rye dough had twice as much molasses as the light as well as 15g of cocoa powder for colour.   I split mine in two after kneading but before fermenting, but stupidly forgot to add in the cocoa, so folded it in by hand during the fermentation.  It started off a bit swirly and my hands were brown and oily, but we eventually got there!

Dough layers pressed together

So once the dough had fermented the shaping fun began.  Each dough was split into two equal pieces - so you have 4 pieces of dough, two light and two dark.  Each piece was flattened into a rectangle and the dark dough placed on top of the light dough and tightly rolled together to form two logs.  The logs were placed seam side down into 2 loaf tins, covered with plastic bags and left to proof for a couple of hours at RT.

Doughs rolled together

In loaf tin

 

Prior to baking (oven preheated to 210°C), the loaves are slashed once straight down the middle of the loaves lengthwise.  Baked with a handful of ice cubes for 25mins.

Baked

I think my loaves were slightly under-proofed so had a lot of spring in the oven, plus I think I slashed them too deeply, and should have only made one big loaf as I think the swirls got a bit distorted.  Also the dough recipe I used probably wasn't the most ideal as it was a very soft, delicate dough, and something slightly firmer would have suited better.  Mr Brettschneider's dough was at 60% hydration (175g AP flour, 75g rye, 150g water), whereas the one I used was 65% excluding the large volume of rye starter.  Still looked pretty cool, will send to YeastSpotting, but would like to get it looking better!

 Crumb

 

As per the original dough made last week, the bread had nice flavour, and the cocoa was not noticeable in the taste.

 

Happiness is making bread!!

K.