Rye bread is different from wheat bread. That is the secret to creating a fabulous rye sourdough.
I guess this should be obvious. To my gluten-trained mind, however, everything I do when I make bread is focused on the development and arrangement of gluten stands, those magic little bands which give wheat bread all that puff and tall shape.
When I started making ryes, I unthinkingly applied the same principles. I kneaded my dough before its first prove. Once proved, I shaped the dough into a loaf and gave it a second prove before baking. None of this makes much sense.
According to baking bible website The Fresh Loaf: "Rye contains much less gluten than wheat, and the gluten rye contains is of poor quality when it comes to trapping air bubbles."1.
This make kneading a waste of time. The sole point of kneading is to develop and scramble gluten strands into a network capable of trapping the air pumped out by yeast. Therefore, pounding a rye dough will achieve absolutely nothing, as there is not enough gluten to develop into anything.
In truth, this first realisation dawned on me a while ago and I stopped bothering to knead my dough. However, it took one more mental leap this weekend to take my rye to the next level.
Stop. Shaping. The. Blasted. Thing!
Why it took me so long realise this beats me. It should be obvious. There is no gluten structure in rye bread. So why I tipped the poor dough out of the proving bowl and punished it by batting into a loaf shape on a surface coated in too much flour (as rye dough is stickier than a bear in a treacle factory) is weird. Perhaps I hoped giving the dough a second rise would allow it to build up extra bubbles?
But this ignores another key consideration. Rye bread hates being played with. Quite why is beyond my current knowledge but is something I have heard from experienced bakers. By shaping the loaf, I was not only failing to achieving anything, as a low-gluten dough is just never going to capture bubbles like a wheat dough, but I was also damaging it through fiddling!
This weekend, therefore, I ran an experiment. I didn't shape the bread and *gasp* didn't give it a second prove. One spin of the fermentation wheel was all it got and into the oven it went.
The results were perfect!
The flavour was deep and sour and the texture was easily the best I have yet achieved. The crumb was really open (well...for rye) and the texture was soft and yielding. It was almost like cake!
Encourage by this success, I'm changing my rye baking method for good and will now follow the below basic recipe:
Ingredients:
- 400g wholegrain rye flour
- 300g water
- 200g sourdough starter
- 2 teaspoons caraway seed (or other flavourings of choice...I do love caraway though)
- 10g salt
Method:
- Feed your starter culture with 100g of your preferred flour (Freya, my starter, is currently on a wholewheat diet. She says she likes that) and 100g water. Leave for around 12 hours or until the culture is noticeably active and well risen.
- Meanwhile, pour the water onto the rye flour. Admittedly, this is a bit of a hangover from wheat bread making as adding water in this way, or autolysing, helps gluten develop. So...erm...not really of use to rye flour then. I kept this process for reasons of aiding water absorption in the dough and encouraging "enzyme" activity. More research to be done here but this step feels important!
- When the starter culture is ready, grease
and line a 2lb / 900g loaf tin. Add 200g of starter to the flour and water slump before sprinkling in the caraway seeds. Mix thoroughly. Then add the salt. You don't want to do this too early as salt kills yeast...and you are working with sourdough and don't want to be hindering the yeast more than necessary. Mix once more until you have a smooth paste a bit like wet concrete (oh yummy...).
- Use a dough scraper to push the dough into the loaf tin and level it off as best you can. You may want to wet the scraper towards the end of the process to stop the dough sticking to it too badly. Sprinkle the top of your loaf with a little flour (it looks pretty) and cover with plastic - a shower cap is ideal and reusable!
- Leave the dough until it is doubled in size and the top surface is cracking and pitted with tiny holes. How long this takes will depend upon your own starter culture and the environment the dough finds itself in. Mine took about 12 hours this time.
- About 45 minutes before the loaf is proved, preheat an oven to 240° C (220° C fan oven). Place a baking stone or metal
tray onto a middle shelf and a baking tin onto the bottom shelf.
- Once the loaf is fully proved, put the tin onto the baking stone and pour a mugful of water into the baking tin on the bottom shelf. Shut the oven door before all the steam can escape!
- After 10 minutes, open the oven door to let the steam escape and turn the over temperature down to 210° C (190° C Fan). Bake for a further 30 minutes until the loaf, when turned out of the tin, sounds hollow when tapped and the top has taken on a good dark brown colour.
- Turn the oven off, drop the loaf back into the tin, put the tin onto the stone and leave the door open a crack. This helps prevent the crust from turning wet and leathery as the residual steam inside the loaf cools.
I'm sure this is not the final destination on my quest for my best ever rye bread. However, I'm convinced that this single prove, no touching method gave me the gorgeous texture I've been craving and is thus a huge step forward in my technique.
And it all stemmed from one important principle I hadn't properly applied. Rye bread is different from wheat bread.
References:
1
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/rye-flour
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