The marble rye bread I made in a spiral pattern left me wanting to try the spiral pattern again. A few days ago I got some books from the library and they showed cinnamon swirl bread, so I decided to make some. The photo above shows the result from my first try. It tastes great and looks great. The problem is that the bread is not bonded across the swirl, if you don’t pick the slice up carefully it unwinds.
In previous posts I have dyed bread purple and made a loaf with red streaks. I have been looking into mixers for bread dough and would like to try a spiral hook as they are apparently more efficient than the typical C shaped hook on my old Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The red streaked loaf was an attempt to add color to mixed dough by kneading it. I wanted pink and got red streaks. For the purple loaf I mixed the dye into the liquid ingredients, which worked quite well.
This is my dough hook, a typical “C” (also known as a “J”) type hook. The disk at the top is to stop the dough from climbing up the hook and getting into the moving parts of the mixer. It works the dough against the sides of the bowl. The volume and consistency of the dough have a serious effect on efficiency of the hook. I would like to try a spiral hook, but have yet to find one compatible with my mixer. The spiral hook pushes the dough down rather than to the side and is said to do a better job developing gluten.
It was obvious to me that the red dye did not mix all that readily with a few minutes of hand kneading. What will happen when a concentrated dye is added after the initial mixing of the wet and dry ingredients? Would it mix the dye in, or would it just bang the dough around the bowl and leave streaks of dyed and undyed bread in the final loaf?
After making light rye bread it seemed logical to me to try to make marble rye. Since I have three identical 8 X 4 loaf pans I attempted three different ways to mix the colors. The results are shown in the photo above. On the left is the bulls eye, the dark round runs down the middle of the loaf with the light in a ring around it. In the middle is an attempt a a marble pattern. The right shows a spiral pattern.
I was surprised to find that the only real difference between light and dark rye is the addition of coffee, carob, or cocoa to add the dark color. Since I don’t care for coffee and carob seemed a little on the exotic side, I decided to use cocoa since I like chocolate. The recipes for the light and dark rye bread are below. The dark differs from the light in two items. First is the addition of 25 grams of cocoa to the ingredients. Second, there are 5 grams more water to compensate for the added cocoa.
These recipes are simply half of the recipe in the previous post Light Rye Bread – part 2. The dry and the wet ingredients Continue reading
We may be living in Florida, but we came from New England. There’s only one acceptable roll for your hot dog and you can’t find one in Florida. The solution is to make them yourself.
Here one is, ready to eat. It’s split in the top, not the sides, and the sides are toasted in butter. This one happens to have some nicely burned kielbasa in it, but it’s a real hot dog roll. Continue reading