Mike Nolan
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I ordered two assortments of rye flour from NY Bakers and they arrived yesterday. (I’m glad it came yesterday, we got an inch and a half of snow overnight.)
It was a bit of a challenge to find containers to hold 8 different three-pound bags of flour, but we managed, losing about half my open counter space in the process, at least for a little while. I now have about as many containers of rye flour as I do wheat flour.
I’m starting the process of building a rye starter, I’ll be using some of the discards from that to make some rye breads in Ginsberg’s book that use commercial yeast.
Aaron, have you made many of his recipes yet? A BBGA member told me he thinks some of those recipe are too wet/gummy or not baked long enough. From what I’ve read about rye, in Ginsberg’s book and elsewhere, I know there are challenges ahead, but I’m hoping to produce some eastern European black bread, as well as some other interesting rye breads.
Locally the only rye flours I can find are the Bob's Red Mill dark rye and some bulk rye flour at the Open Harvest Coop and Hy-Vee that both appear to also be a dark rye flour (and may be from the same source), it looks similar to several of the ones I got from NY Bakers.
Ideal Grocery, a Lincoln fixture since 1919, carried bags of medium rye that they were repackaging, but it burned down several years ago and wasn't rebuilt. The people who run Leons bought Ideal about 8 years ago but Leons doesn't carry everything that Ideal did, and I don't really shop there much. They do carry a mustard from France that I like.
I also still have some of the pumpernickel flour I was getting from the Mennonite store in TN, though none of the ones I got from NY Bakers appears to be the same flour. When I was buying whole rye berries and grinding them up in my flour mill at the coarsest settings, that flour looked fairly similar to the pumpernickel flour.
It kind of hard to tell some of the 8 types of rye flour apart, there's one that's really coarse, almost like rye chops. There's one that appears to be really fine, several of the others appear fairly similar, time will tell whether I can detect much difference.
The total price from NY Bakers, with shipping, was in the $3.60 per pound range, a bit more expensive than the local options, but not that different from KAF and other online sources, and now I've got a lot of options to try. I doubt I'll use enough rye flour to justify buying a 25 or 50 pound bag of any one flour.
I ordered it on the 8th, it came on the 16th, that's not too bad. I didn't get a tracking number from them (it came Fedex), but I don't think KAF sends them, either. I'm spoiled by Amazon, which not only gives you detailed tracking information but if it is coming via an Amazon truck they'll tell you how many stops away the truck is on delivery day. They've definitely raised the bar for online ordering.
Looking through the recipes in Ginsberg's Rye Baker book, I didn't see any that use first clear flour. Maybe its just too hard to get. (I don't think NY Bakers stocks it.)
Followup: There are a few recipes in TRB that mention clear flour as an alternative to bread flour.
