Better Rye Bread

 Maurizio at The Perfect Loaf wrote an article about making sourdough rye bread. It completely turned my method on its head. He uses a large sponge (he calls it a preferment) using all rye flour and a shorter rise before baking.

It worked great!

I didn't copy his recipe. I like the rye and spelt recipe that I have been making for years. I just moved my ingredients around to mimic Maurizio's process.

1. The night before baking, I make my sponge with:

Sponge
Water	220 g
Rye Flour	180 g
Ripe Starter	110 g

 It starts like this:

In the morning it looks like this:

All of the water from my recipe has gone into the sponge. I used most of the rye from my recipe, but it is too dense to mix if I put it all in. The white flour that I used to use to make my sponge now goes in at the end, so there are 200 grams of white flour where there used to be 100.

In the morning I add the rest of my ingredients:

Rye Bread
Sponge
Milk	4 oz.
Salt	1 tsp
Caraway seeds	1 Tbl
Oil	2 Tbl
Vital gluten	2 Tbl
Rye flour	60 g
Spelt flour	100 g
White bread flour	200 g

I used to use a custom program on my bread machine to maximize the rise time. Maurizio says that is not necessary, and he is right. I now use the normal whole wheat cycle on my machine, and I get a nice tall and light loaf of rye bread.

Thanks, Maurizio.