Coming Through the Rye

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Viewing 15 posts - 106 through 120 (of 139 total)
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  • #24151
    BakerAunt
    Participant

      That bread looks wonderful, Mike. I like ham and rye, turkey and rye, tuna and rye, cheese and rye....

      I had a slight collapse in the center of my Cinnamon Raisin Sourdough Bread today, but I think it was due to not enough flour in proportion to the liquid, especially as I had a small blow-out on one side.

      #24152
      Mike Nolan
      Keymaster

        High hydration doughs are challenging, especially for a free-form baker like me. Sweet doughs and ones with things like raisins in them present some unique challenges, too. Many bakers claim doughs with cinnamon behave a bit differently, too, but I haven't really noticed that.

        This latest rye is a good sandwich bread, not many black breads are, though some are often served with jam on them.

        If the rye bread is good enough, all it needs is to be toasted and have a little butter or margarine on it. This one is good enough.

        #26384
        Mike Nolan
        Keymaster

          This isn't one of the Ginsberg recipes, but I may try it soon anyway.

          In place of a double-walled water-filled baking pan, which seems to be impossible to find, it suggests using two Pullman pans, one that fits completely inside the other with the lids on and the outer one filled with water. It bakes at a low temperature for 24 hours.

          This recipe might give me an excuse to buy not one but two Pullman pans.

          Pumpernickel Bread

          #26571
          Mike Nolan
          Keymaster

            Report on Avergne Rye-Wheat Boule (Ginsberg pps 111-113):

            Recipes without pictures put you under less pressure to produce a loaf that looks like the carefully styled picture, which may be the best of a dozen or more loaves produced before the photo shoot.

            Ginsberg calls this a boule, which usually means a circular shaped loaf, but he specifies making a football shape and I, of course, made it more rectangular.

            a‑rye1

            The recipe makes around a kilogram of dough for one loaf. (I got about 30 grams less dough than the recipe called for, I guess I didn't scrape the starter bowls enough.) The post-bake weight after cooling was 820 grams.

            I did have to add a little more water to the rye starter, it was at 100% hydration and it just sat there for a few hours, before I stirred in a little more water. By morning it was very active.

            The dough comes together easily, shapes easily and rises well. It takes an interesting approach to the question of whether you add dry to wet or wet to dry, you stir the two starters into the water and then add that to the dry flour. That has the advantage that it doesn't cause a cloud of flour from the mixer, which is often the case if you put the starter in the bottom of the bowl and the dry ingredients on top. I may have to try that with other starter-based breads.

            I lowered the temperature a little more than the recipe specified after the steam pan came out, it came out with a nice dark crust.

            The interior is also nice and dark, the crust is quite firm but it slices easily.

            a‑rye2

            My wife says it doesn't have much of a rye smell after cooling, she thought it smelled more like a beer bread. I thought the aroma had pleasant smokey notes to it, most likely due to the charring of the crust.

            It has a strong but not overpowering sourdough tang to it, and it toasts very well. It probably wouldn't make a good sandwich bread, but I could see eating a slice of it with a hearty bowl of soup or stew.

            Update: This rye bread actually went well with the baked ham I made today, it has a very different flavor profile than a deli-style rye, the ham brings out sweet undernotes in the Avergne wheat-rye.

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            #26581
            BakerAunt
            Participant

              That bread looks delicious, Mike.

              With the weather starting to cool, I'm beginning to think about rye bread again. I really liked the Pumpkin Rye bread recipe on Ginsberg's blog (not in the book), which I made three or four times last year. I was able to buy three pie pumpkins at the farmers market on Saturday, so there is pumpkin rye bread in our future, especially if I can buy some additional pie pumpkins next week.

              #29280
              Mike Nolan
              Keymaster

                Report on Jewish Bakery Pumpernickel (Ginsberg pps 93-96):

                pump2

                This is a really good pumpernickel bread, but I did fiddle with the recipe a little. It produced two loaves about 650 grams each from (730 grams pre-baking weight), the loaves are about 10 inches x 5 inches by 2 1/2 inches.

                Both of the sponge stages call for coarse rye meal, and the coarse rye meal I have is almost like cracked grain, which I thought might be too coarse to be the only rye in the recipe, so I used coarse rye meal for the first sponge and medium rye meal for the second.

                I used first clear flour in the final dough, and I added about a tablespoon of caraway seed.

                It uses some caramel color to produce a darker loaf.

                I also used an egg wash rather than a cornstarch glaze, because cornstarch glaze always seems to produce a white pasty exterior, and this produced a nice shiny one.

                It produces a fairly stiff dough, but it mixes well and it rose decently. I did let the final rise go for about 90 minutes as opposed to the 45 minutes in the recipe. Actual baking time was in the middle of the range in the recipe, by which point the internal temperature was about 206.

                It slices easily and has a good internal crumb.

                pumpslice

                We used this bread for a batch of Reubens, and they were great. It was also pretty good with just little butter on it.

                It also passes the toast test with flying colors.

                This recipe is a real keeper, I'm sure I'll be making it again--soon!

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                #29285
                RiversideLen
                Participant

                  That looks real good Mike.

                  #29286
                  BakerAunt
                  Participant

                    That bread looks so good, Mike. We need a portal at Nebraska Kitchen that allows us to shoot slices of bread, pie, cake, etc. to others....

                    #29287
                    aaronatthedoublef
                    Participant

                      Looks really good - dark and rich! Where did you find first clear? I cannot find it any place except KAB anymore and it's really expensive.

                      The local miller I've used some did not know what it is so I sent them some links. They have something they say is like it so I might ask for a sample.

                      #29288
                      Mike Nolan
                      Keymaster

                        I bought a 50 pound bag of clear flour from Stover Company in the Pittsburgh area in 2019 when we were there visiting my son and his family. I think it cost me about $25. It seems to be holding up well in storage. (I put at least a third of it in the freezer.) It was Bay State brand, but Ardent Mills also makes one.

                        My former neighbor, the head of the local Sysco office, checked with Pillsbury and ConAgra, they only sold clear flour in the east (maybe as far west as Ohio) and in a few places on the west coast, though he could order it by the pallet (40 bags.) It's probably a marketing issue, most of the large mills are in the central US, and the way roller mills work they generate LOTS of clear flour, but if there's no interest in it, it isn't worth packaging and storing it. I believe it is sold in bulk as animal feed.

                        I've ordered 50 pound bags of flour from Baker's Authority, most recently medium rye, but I also ordered 50 pounds of semolina from them, shipping for a bag that big is sometimes higher than the cost of the flour itself, but even $65 for 50 pounds is still a lot cheaper than King Arthur. If I buy semolina locally it costs me about $2.50 a pound, rye flour is next to impossible to find locally other than Bob's Red Mill, and only one type a dark rye that is a fairly fine texture, if I want medium rye or coarse rye meal, I will either have to buy it online or buy rye berries (also not easy to find at a good price) and grind my own.

                        If I was a little younger, I might think about trying to open up a store that specialized in bakery products including varietal flours, but I don't know if it would be successful enough and I'm not sure I've got the energy for it any more.

                        The rye flour came UPS and the box was pretty beat up by the time it got here, but the bag inside was still intact enough the flour hadn't been compromised. I kind of feel sorry for the UPS driver having to lug that thing around, though.

                        I think the semolina I ordered was prepared at a mill in Wyoming, then shipped to Ohio or Texas before it was shipped to me in Nebraska. Kind of a long trip.

                        Last spring I bought a small chest freezer when our main freezer needed some repairs, the plan was to use it mainly for storing flours afterwards and that's working out pretty good.

                        I've been using plastic jars that I buy M&M's in at Sams (62.5 ounce size), they work pretty well for storing 2-3 pounds of flour, but when I bought my rye flour recently I also went out to Sams and bought some 6 quart round Cambro-style containers.

                        #29289
                        Mike Nolan
                        Keymaster

                          Part of the reason it is so dark is it had some powdered caramel coloring in it. However, that was the last of my caramel coloring and King Arthur doesn't seem to carry it any more, so I'll have to order it from somewhere else. :sigh:

                          #29303
                          Joan Simpson
                          Participant

                            Mike your rye looks awesome!

                            #29307
                            Mike Nolan
                            Keymaster

                              This is a REALLY good pumpernickel. It uses both a rye starter and some commercial yeast, I'm not sure how it would come out if you just used commercial yeast. It isn't assertively 'sour', though I can taste some sourness. Some of the rye breads I've made from the Ginsberg book have been in-your-face sour, this one isn't.

                              #29325
                              aaronatthedoublef
                              Participant

                                "Sour" is interesting. I used to have a really sour starter and what was good about that was I could make sour sourdough (too many sours) quickly. But I couldn't make something lighter. Now I have a starter that is sweeter that I can make more sour with time.

                                If I could have multiple starters hanging out I would have a sour one and a sweet one (and maybe rye and wheat variants too). But, until I have my own kitchen that won't happen.

                                Thanks for the tip on first clear Mike. The first time I ordered a 50 lb bag of flour the shipping was $11 (including the box of parchment. The next time I went to order flour shipping was $35. It was cheaper to by 48 lbs of flour in 8 lb bags from Walmart because the shipping was free.

                                #29327
                                kimbob
                                Participant

                                  Mike, your breads look like they came from a bakery! Good job.

                                Viewing 15 posts - 106 through 120 (of 139 total)
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