The darker the rye flour, the more of the bran it contains. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does affect the texture of the dough and makes for a denser loaf. Using first clear flour would also darken it a bit, since it's more cream colored than white.

Many people use a little cocoa powder to darken a rye bread loaf, but I prefer using powdered caramel coloring, I think the cocoa powder can be detected on the tongue. Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce is another commonly used coloring agent.

What's a good internal temp for a well-baked loaf of rye bread?

Thanks

Thanks for that compliment, Aaron!

I have used cocoa powder to make the rye darker and I agree, that does alter the flavor. Not a bad thing but it tastes less like rye. You can use brewed coffee in place of the water to darken the loaf too. I use decaf because caffeine doesn't agree with me. If you're making the bread for other people I suggest decaf as well as you might not be aware of other people's tolerance for caffeine.

I used to use a blend of 1/2 KAF medium rye and 1/2 KAF Pumpernickel, which is the whole grain dark rye. The past couple of years I have been using just the Pumpernickel. In my opinion, the keys to making the rye light in texture is (1) making a sponge, and (2) make sure the dough is properly hydrated. Although recipes I have seen usually use only part of the rye and water to make the sponge, I use 100% of the water and rye for the sponge.

I agree with Mike about the internal temp of 200 degrees, 205 won't hurt it but I'd be careful not to go over that.

Today I baked KAF Chewy Semolina Rye bread but made it into a raisin bread. I did that by omitting the onion and adding cinnamon (a heaping tsp) and a cup of raisins. It's delicious.

Slashing can be done for both decorative and functional purposes, ie, more control over the rise and preventing blowouts. I've always suspected that some bakeries use the slashing pattern to help identify the type of bread, too.

I read a note on another baking site recently that said when making diagonal slashes across a loaf, an odd number of slashes (ie, 3 or 5) is more pleasing than an even number of slashes. Do people agree?

Rye breads also take well to decorative stencils.

I think I have the site set to support 'large' images up to 1250 x 1250 pixels and 'medium' images of 400 x 300 pixels.

My big camera is usually set to produce 4000 x 6000 pixel images that are between 5MB and 6MB each, I usually reduce them down to 400 x 600 for posting here, although technically I upload them to another site of mine and then just post a link. The two I posted earlier today reduced down to under 170K when I did that.

A stretch and fold or two and/or getting a tighter skin when shaping might have helped produce a taller loaf, but I find it difficult to get a free form rectangular loaf that is taller than about 3.5 inches. The right type of slashing can also help produce rise in the direction you want the loaf to go. Large round loaves are easier to get tall, but I prefer loaves where most of the slices are around the same size, and I suspect someone running a deli would need that as well. If you want a true 'deli loaf' shape you might need to bake it in a deli loaf pan. I think I've seen 4, 6 or 8 gang deli loaf pans on some professional baking sites.

Adding pickle juice is a good way to add some sour without going the sourdough starter route, but you have to be careful about how much salt you add then, because pickle juice is often high in salt.

I don't have a smart phone so I have no experience with whether the photo resolution can be adjusted.

There are quite a few tools out there that can be used to scale down the resolution of a digital photo, crop it or convert it from one image type to another. (I use ImageMagick, a Linux-platform tool, but I've been a Linux geek for longer than I care to think about, dating back to before version 1.0.)