Rye My Way

I prepared my sponge in the usual way this morning, taking 4 oz. of starter and adding 4 oz. of water and 4 oz. of flour.  I hadn't decided at the time what I was going to make when I got home from work. I was really in the mood for rye bread.  I like the sour cream rye recipe, but I didn't have any sour cream.  Not only that, I've been itching to try the regular caraway rye recipe that I haven't made since February.

Well, for starters (no pun intended, but I'll accept it, now), my old recipe called for about 50% more starter. The original recipe called for adding 6 oz. of water and 6 oz. of flour to make my sponge.  So, right off the bat, I'm in wing-it mode.  I suspect that this recipe will work fine with the same sponge that my other recipes use, I'll just need to add some more water and white flour to the recipe along with the rest of the ingredients.  That means that I need 2 oz. more water and 2 oz. more white flour.  Two ounces of white flour is 3/8 of a cup.  I don't have that measuring cup, but it's close enough to 1/3.  Besides, the old recipe had so much more white flour than rye, I ought to call it rye-flavored white bread.  I might even try adjusting the ratio of rye to white upwards in future attempts.

My notes from before suggested that I might have had better success with a little more water, so I added an additional ounce.

One final change is that the old recipe didn't have any oil or butter in it.  The sour cream rye recipe uses 2 Tbl of oil, so I added that.

I've tinkered with this recipe enough that I think I can call it mine, now.

My Rye Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	7 oz.
Salt	1 tsp
Caraway seeds	1 Tbl
Oil	2 Tbl
Vital gluten	2 tsp
Rye flour	1 Cup
White bread flour	2 1/3 Cup

The dough ball looks healthy.  It had lots of remnants stuck to the brim of the pan, at first, but I scraped them off with a spatula and added them to the dough ball.

I'm not sure what the secret ingredient was, but this loaf came out as tall as my whole wheat bread made with commercial yeast.

Here is this loaf:

Here is the non-sourdough whole wheat loaf that I last made:

I'm completely full from dinner, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow to taste it.

My Old Reliable Whole Wheat Recipe

OK, I know this is a sourdough blog, but this entry is not about sourdough.  I was out of bread and didn't have time for the whole refresh-starter (6-8 hours), sponge growth (6-8 hours), bread machine cycle (3-4 hours) routine.  I decided to remind myself what my old friend, whole wheat made with commercial yeast was like.

The advantage to this method is that it only takes 4 hours from start to finish, and only takes about 5 minutes of my time.  The recipe is

Whole Wheat
Water	9  oz.
Whole wheat flour	2¼  cups
White flour	1¼ cup
Salt	1½  tsp
Butter	1½ Tbl
Honey	¼ cup
Yeast	2½ tsp

Yep, just throw all of that in the bread pan, push the start button, and in under four hours you get this:

Check out that height compared to my tallest sourdough bread, the sour cream rye.

After eating all of these heavy sourdough loaves for the past several months, this light and airy whole wheat seems almost like eating Wonder Bread.  I like the challenge and science of the sourdough recipes, but this old favorite is still going to be in my baking rotation.

Good Old White Bread

This is a slight variation on the World Bread recipe from the book.  My starting point was

My World Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
White bread flour	2½  Cup
Milk	¼ Cup
Vegetable Oil	2 tsp
Sugar	2 Tbl
Salt	¾ tsp

First off, who has a ¾ tsp measuring spoon?  Not me.  I changed that to a heaping ½ tsp.  Next, there wasn't nearly enough liquid in this starting recipe.  During the first mixing cycle, the "dough" looks like this:

There is dry flour in the corners and clumps of partly mixed stuff stuck to the upper part of the pan.  I immediately added another  half of  ¼  cup of milk.  Yes, I know, I could have said 1/8 cup, but I don't have that measuring item, either.  I just guessed when my ¼  cup looked half full.

That mixture looked a little soupy, but I decided to let it go.  After mixing for a while, it looked pretty good.

and the end product looked pretty good as well.

It tastes much like the sourdough bread that I remember from when I lived in the San Francisco area.  I've been eating various types of whole-grain bread for so long that white bread seems like a guilty pleasure, but I'll make this again.  The recipe for success is now

My World Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
White bread flour	2½  Cup
Milk	3 oz.
Vegetable Oil	2 tsp
Sugar	2 Tbl
Salt	Heaping ½ tsp

Next, I revisited my tried and true whole wheat without sourdough recipe.