Rye breads

[aaronatthedoublef]

Hi. I want to try a rye bread with the goal of making a Jewish deli rye for some friends who want to open a Jewish deli.

I have Marcy Goldman's "Jewish Holiday Baking" and she has a Montreal style Jewish rye that uses a starter which I can do. I've also looked at Peter Reinhart's BBA which has a neat rye but it uses a starter that uses a barm and while I want to try that I cannot do it in our kitchen. All that stuff growing would not fly. 🙂 Then there is Peter Lahy's no-knead which does not use a starter but rises at room temperature for 18-24 hours with the aim of giving it the fermentation taste of a starter without making a starter.

I'm tempted to use Ms. Goldman's as she has been my go-to for Jewish baking (aside from my mom who never made rye bread) for over 20 years now. But Mr. Lahy's is easier. Anyone have any advice before I attempt this?

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[Mike Nolan]

I see two challenges here.

The first is volume. A reasonably busy deli could easily go through 20 loaves of bread a day.

The second problem is meeting sanitary standards as a supplier to a restaurant, if that's your intent. Those vary so much around the country that it's hard to say much here, so you'll need to do your research.

The good news is that sourdough techniques scale up very well, in fact I think it's less work to maintain a large starter (eg, in a 4-10 gallon container) than a small one.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I'm really looking to come up with a master recipe or two I can turn over. I'm just wondering about the difference between making a loaf then having it sit for 24 hours vs. making a started and building a loaf from it. Maybe I'll try both and see what happens.

There is no way I can do production work in my kitchen. Connecticut is starting to come around to allowing people to bake in home kitchens but all the state law changes have done is allow towns to make rules that allow it. But even if my town permitted it, it stresses out my wife and it's not worth it. Home kitchens are deemed not fit. The irony is that the one professional kitchen I can use is far dirtier and the equipment more dangerous than anything that is allowed in someone's house by town codes. And since anyone can rent this space the assumption that it will be used by professionals who know what they are doing is just wrong.

The law, in my town, is aimed at protecting restaurants and bakeries more than people. It is the same reason we ban food trucks unless they are associated with a brick and mortar restaurant.

But enough politics!

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure what the Nebraska laws are, booths at the Lincoln farmers markets can apparently opt out of the commercial kitchen requirements, but does that allow a cat in the kitchen? I doubt it. (What's ironic about that is that historically bakers usually had a cat or two to control the rodent population.)

The food truck regulations here in Lincoln are basically stacked in favor of the brick-and-mortar restaurants, food trucks are not permitted to park on public streets for more than 15 minutes at a time, carts are not permitted on the sidewalks and none of the shopping centers that have restaurants in them will allow food trucks to park there except for rare special events. So they tend to use things like church parking lots. Two of the best food trucks have given up completely, and I think a third one (associated with a good Mexican restaurant) may have given up last fall.

Building and using a mother culture is much easier if you're baking nearly every day, you don't have to throw away half of the starter each time you feed it, you just use that for today's baking.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks for the tip on the mother starter. I think I may bake two different loaves, one with and one without and the starter and give my friends a choice.

Food trucks here have become popular for a couple of different uses. They are a new way to do catering (including chef-to-farm dinners) and also we have quite a few microbreweries that do not have or want kitchens. They partner with food trucks to bring in food and they can have a great variety without a big investment.

When I was a kid in Chicago lots of places had cats for just the reason you said. But these days no one wants to admit to needing to keep the rodent population down.

[Mike Nolan]

We have gotten an invasion of mice from outside the last two falls, and our two cats don't seem to have much interest in catching mice. Well, the grey one caught some baby mice, but not any full-grown ones.

So I use old-fashioned traps, some baited with peanut butter and some baited with chocolate. This year it was about 50-50 as to which caught more.

Before the food truck craze got to Lincoln, we had two chefs set up huge barbecue tanks (no other word describes them properly) at local gas stations. You could smell them 2-3 blocks away!

If you haven't read the Tartine Bakery books, I suggest doing so, while the recipes and methods have been strucured for home use, the text talks a lot about how he does sourdough for the bakery. There used to be a couple of websites online that discuss how to maintain a sourdough culture for bakery production, I think I found one of them through the Bread Baker's Guild site, http://www.bbga.org/

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