Rye bread recipe wanted...

[mattl]

Just wondering if anyone has a recipe for a heavy, moist sourdough caraway rye bread.  Over the years I've tried to duplicate our families favorite bread that came from a bakery that is long gone, but never found one that came close.  The baker called it a San Francisco sourdough rye but that seems to have been his term for it.  He made it in  large round loaves the weighed quite a bit, 3-4 pounds I'd guess.  He imported special ovens to bake it in, when he died the bakery was sold and the new owner ripped out the ovens that had turned out great breads for many decades.

 

I've never had much luck with this type of bread dough, sweet doughs I can easily do, but a rye bread so far has stumped me.

 

[maytagbear]

Try at

King Arthur Flour's website. They have countless bread recipes that always work.

I like to eat rye bread, but the few times I have tried to make it, I have not been too pleased with the results.

link is to the website.

Lawrence/Maytagbear

http://kingarthurflour.com

 

[bajaespuma]

...comin' thru the rye.

Rye breads are notoriously difficult to make from scratch and a lot of so-called "Jewish Rye's" sold in the US are less than 10% rye flour and depend on caraway seeds and caramel coloring to distinguish themselves from other pan breads.

 

Rye flour produces little or no gluten which is the protein that traps fermentation gases and makes wheat breads rise. Rye doughs are also notoriously sticky, slack and difficult to shape and mold. If you really want to learn how to make them, since you are very near one of the best artisan bread bakeries in the US, Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, go there and see if you can't volunteer for a week or so and get at least a feel for working with rye.

 

I teach baking in a couple of local colleges and I always tell my beginning students that rye breads and sourdough breads are really advanced baking subjects and would be better learned after you are well practiced in conventional wheat flour doughs. Germany produces the largest and best variety of rye breads in the world and they actually legislate breads by amount or percentage of rye flour in the dough, ranging from 100% (REAL Pumpernickel which goes into special coffers as a batter and takes up to 14 hours to bake during which time the starches caramelize and give the bread it's distinctive dark color) to 1 %.

 

If you want to try to teach yourself how to bake with rye and how to work with sourdoughs, I would recommend you find a copy of Nancy Silverton's "Breads from the La Brea Bakery". She's someone I've worked with and think is very talented, but, more importantly, the book is well written and the recipes work. One of the biggest problems you are going to have is procuring the right rye flour as there are no standards for different grades of rye flour as there are in Germany and in France. You may be lucky enough to find White Rye, Medium Rye and Dark Rye as well as "Pumpernickel Flour" and "Rye chops" in a good local organic market, but make sure that the flours are fresh. Rye will turn rancid if left at room temperature for more than a couple of weeks so try to go to a market that has a lot of turnover. The King Arthur Flour catalogue may be a good resource; I've bought a lot of good wheat flour from them, but no rye.

 

Also, be aware that rye flour is unusually susceptible to contamination by a type of mold called ergot. Ergot is what they start with to synthesize LSD, so you can imagine what ergot poisoning can be like. It is widely thought that whole towns went mad and died in the Middle Ages from eating from silos holding inoculated grain. The last case of documented ergotamine poisoning was from a rye-bread sandwich eaten by a doctor, no less at NYU medical school in the Seventies.

 

I will look for some easy rye formula to post here, but as with most bread baking, it's not so much the formula as the technique which will require some practice and lots and lots of patience. I can give you a good tip as well: a dishwasher makes a GREAT proof-box. Run this dishwasher through 1 fill and cycle, then put your dough inside. The steam from the hot water is perfect for rye breads. Remember that humidity is almost more important than heat in working with yeast doughs.

 

[mattl]

bajaespuma, thanks for the informative post.  I have found it to be difficult, you are correct there.  What I'm after is more on the order of Jewish rye, it's a moderately light color with caraway as you described.

 

Over the years I've tried many variations, none turned out well enough to even consider making again.  I've tried various sourdough starters, even tried putting the sponge outdoors for a bit to catch some "wild" yeast, which one recipe suggested.  Now and then we come across a bread we like, and my Dad had various family members transport bread across the state when we found one we liked.

 

As I said I'm very good with sweet doughs, but those are very forgiving.  I can bake just about anything else but a good rye bread, I'll have to track down the book you mentioned.

 

[polkanut]

I prefer my rye on the rocks! lol  Seriously though, Kreger's bakery here in town that makes an outstanding caraway rye with or without salted tops.  I love it for grilled cheese sandwiches.

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[bajaespuma]

Matt,

 

The problem with sourdough baking is that it isn't something you can just decide to do in a day or two. It's like farming: you have to plan, prepare, prepare the soil, get the seeds or seedlings. fertilize, plant, W  A  I  T,  water, feed, weed sow, W A I T, and then you have to be out in the fields every single day without fail, or your crops aren't going to come in the way you want them. The best teacher I ever had for sourdough baking was the great Albert Kumin himself, who taught us that keeping and maintaining a viable sourdough culture was like having pets in that they had to be tended to, refreshed with flour and water at least 3 times a day without fail or they would die. This is true. Successful sourdough bakers bake bread at least once a day FOREVER (as was done by village bakers all over the world for ages). You can borrow or steal some sourdough from a friend or a business and use it right away in some bread dough and even get the benefits in terms of flavor, texture and keeping qualities, but to maintain one for baking consistently is more of a commitment than marriage.

 

You can try this method that I learned from a great sourdough rye  baker in the NE, Richard Bourdon of Housatonic Bread Bakery in Massachusetts--and this doesn't always work! Mix 1 cup of ORGANIC FRESH whole wheat flour (not rye for some reason) with 1 cup of water and put it in a hygienically clean plastic container (to prevent mold) with a lid (the container should be at least 3 times the size of the starter. Put the container in the coldest corner of the basement or a dark room (50 degrees is ideal) and leave it for 2 weeks. If, at the end of the 2 weeks, your starter has risen and there is NO MOLD on or in it, start feeding it another 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water 3 times a day. Remember that the sourdough yeast and bacteria cultures in that starter are living things and will have to be fed and watered 3 times a day or THEY WILL DIE. If and whenever you see mold on your culture it is dying or dead. Start over.

 

Once you have an active and viable culture, you can start baking with it, but remember that sourdough cultures are very unpredictable. They will not rise as <span style="text-decoration: underline;">dependably</span> or as <span style="text-decoration: underline;">quickly</span> as commercial baker's yeast. Also, Bourdon insists that if you are using baker's yeast in your kitchen your sourdough culture will inevitably succumb to that very strong culture, and although you will still have some sour bacterial cultures in your starter, it will become more and more like conventional baker's yeast as time goes by. A microbiologist at Yale confirmed that this was a likely scenario.

 

When I bake with baker's yeast, I give my doughs at least 3 hours for bulk fermentation at 75 degrees F and then another 1 1/2 hours final proof for my shaped loaves. For sourdoughs, I would plan to double those times and raise the heat to 85 degrees F especially if you are working with rye. Patience and time management are essential for this kind of baking. No way around it.

 

Flour quality is crucial here. I recommend King Arthur All-Purpose flour for all applications because, even though it isn't certified Organic, it's milled from organic wheats and it is neither bleached or bromated so all of the essential nutrients and natural compounds in the wheat are there. The King Arthur Bread flour in the blue and white bag is especially good to use in rye breads because the extra gluten you get from it will help counteract the slackness and stickiness of the rye flour. You can experiment with any good organic flour, wheat or rye, from any source, but there are no guarantees of panifiability. Just make sure the flour you use is fresh and of good quality. The stuff from the big mills is crap; don't use it.

 

Nancy Silverton has an excellent Jewish Rye called "Izzy's Jewish Rye" that is in her book. Try looking for it. It sounds like the kind of rye you want to make and it's a good place to start--a light rye that has a lot of high-gluten wheat flour in it to help with workability and handling. Silverton also uses a technique of soaking organic whole grapes in a loose batter of organic wheat flour and water to start a sour starter. I haven't done it but I'm told it works if you follow her instructions to the letter. You might also want to look at a newly published book called "Tartine Breads" written by two former students of mine, Chad Robertson and Liz Prueitt. Chad worked with Robert Bourdon for a couple of years and learned a lot from him and Chad and Liz are great bakers. If you're ever out in San Francisco you might want to go to their Bakery called "Tartine" in the Mission district. Tell them I said "hello" they might remember me since I was the one that put them together in their very first baking class.

 

[spiralator60]

Sourdough Starter

Ken,

You said that the starter needs to be fed and watered three times a day. Optimally, how far apart in hours could these occur in a single day, successfully?

The reason that I ask is because there are days when because of work committments, it is impossible to be present to feed and water the starter every 8 hours.

 

[bajaespuma]

Yes, you could feed it once every 8 hours when you have a very healthy and vital starter. You might want to add a little more flour if you're going to do it that way to "retard" it a little. Once a starter is in good shape, it can wait a little bit (like an older puppy that's been housebroken for a long time), but the best way to do sourdough is to bake with it every day and refresh it as often as possible.

 

Remember that in the old days, when people did make bread every day, making the new dough counted as one of the feedings. The baker would simply remove a piece of the new dough and then use that for the starter for the next day. Usually it's best to remove that piece of dough before one adds the salt and all the other crap like seeds, sugar, molasses, whatever.

 

When we would make a pumpernickel dough, for instance we would add the starter to fresh water and fresh flour, usually 100% new flour, 68% new water and 25% starter, using baker's percentages where the flour is set to 100%. Then we would mix that for, say, 5 minutes, remove 25% of that total ({100+68+25}/4) and set it aside as the next day's starter. What was left in the mixer would then get salt, flavorings, etc. That reserved dough would be refreshed twice by the afternoon and then the night time crews for the next day's dough.