Wow! This bread is a winner! I was a little nervous after reading some other people's blogs on this bread, but mine came out fantastic! The dough was very supple and enjoyable to work with and the bread was quick - only five or so hours from mixing to pulling the bread out of the oven.
This rye bread tastes fantastic. It's not dry at all, and the hint of molasses is just the right touch to complement the rye flavor.
The coolest part of this bread is how awesome it looks with the marbling and swirling. This is accomplished by making two separate doughs. To my surprise, there was only one difference between the two, and that was a coloring additive to the dark dough. Caramel coloring was recommended, but since I didn't have any available I used an alternative - two tablespoons of cocoa powder dissolved in two tablespoons of water. Not as dark as I'd imagine it would be with the caramel coloring, but not bad at all.
I used two different shaping methods and two different baking methods for these loaves, as you can see from the pictures. I'd intended to use a loaf pan going in, but the formula mentioned that free-form baking was preferred. My free-form loaf got pretty fat in the middle, but still quite nice.
The best part was marbling. For my free-form loaf, I went with the actual marbling technique, which consists of chopping the doughs into small pieces, mixing them together, and smushing them up into one big lump of dough. You can see the marbling results at the top of this post.
The second method I used was the swirl method. For this one, the light and dark doughs are divided in half (after being split in half for the two loaves, of course). Each piece is then rolled into an oblong. These are layered together, then rolled up lengthwise. The picture is a little blurry, but shows the swirl quite nicely.
