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My impromptu sour cream raisin pie came out pretty good. The recipe I was using was for a 9" pie and I had enough left over pie dough for an 8" blind baked pie. So I cut the recipe by a third, except for the egg yolk, which I left the same since I wanted 3 egg whites worth of meringue, and the cinnamon, which I doubled. I also substituted nutmeg for ground clove. My wife's only comment on taste was that she thought it could have used more sour cream, which I agreed with. I think she was disappointed I used an Italian meringue, which doesn't weep. (She likes the brown droplets from the weeping, I don't, and I took this as an opportunity to practice making an Italian meringue.)
There are easy bread recipes and harder ones, I always recommend new bakers start out with a few simple ones, like the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty bread or the Austrian Malt bread. You can substitute in 1/2 cup of rye flour in either of those to get a light rye without really affecting the recipe.
Over the years I've been inching up the amount of rye flour to bread flour I use in the marbled rye recipe, I've gone as high as 50-50 but I think 40/60 is a little easier to work with.
Here's what the marbled rye looks like when you cut it:
Report on Frisian Rye Bread (The Rye Baker, pps 184-186):
I forgot to take a picture of the whole loaf before cutting a slice, but it was made in a 9x5 loaf pan and is about 3 3/4 inches high. The recipe made one loaf that weighed about 1100 grams. It can be sliced fairly thin, a slice is between 40 and 50 grams.
The top is quite dark compared to the interior, so I've provided a shot showing the exterior and both the interior and top:
When it first came out of the oven there were distinct notes of molasses in the bread, though there's no molasses in the recipe, but that faded somewhat overnight.
I did tinker with the recipe a bit, because I have nearly 1200 grams of sour rye starter that was discarded during feedings. So rather than build the first level sponge using fresh rye flour inoculated with a little of the rye sour, I took about 360 grams of the discards and added water to match the amount of flour and water in the formula. It was a little slow to rise (having just come out of the refrigerator), so I added a little more rye sour the next morning and let it sit until the following morning, by which time it was sufficiently active. The second stage sponge seemed to perform as the recipe suggested it should, and the dough was like a very thick batter after 8 minutes of kneading, which was also how I expected it to be.
This recipe starts out in a cold oven, with the temperature turned down 20 minutes after the oven is at the initial temperature setting, so it doesn't use steam. The loaf cooled for 24 hours before it was sliced, per the instructions.
The interior is more moist than I thought it would be, even though the interior temperature was over 205 degrees when I took it out. It might have benefited from another 10-20 minutes in the oven.
There's a very assertive sour flavor to it, which doesn't really go away when the bread is toasted. How much my tinkering with the recipe, using over 360 grams of 'discarded' rye sour, is unclear, I may have to make this recipe a second time at some point.
Toasting it doesn't appreciably change the flavor, but a buttered slice of it (untoasted) paired very well with baked pork-n-beans. I tried spreading some of the cheese dip on a slice, it went well, too.
