BarBBQ Bill decided he wanted rye bread.  He was making borscht (beet soup) and a fresh loaf of rye bread to go with it just seemed the right thing to do.

He didn’t want just any old rye bread.  He wanted sourdough rye.

I’m gonna take a whack at it (even though I have no clue how this is going to turn out).

First, I need a rye starter (I think?), so I took about 1/4 cup of my regular starter and added 1-1/4 cups of lukewarm water and 2 cups of rye flour to it.  Mixed it well and let it sit, covered, at room temperature overnight.

The next morning, I discarded half and added 1/2 cup of water and 1 cup of rye flour.  Let that sit for about 4 hours.  I again discarded half and decided that the remaining starter looked a bit thicker than I thought it should (remember I have no idea what I’m doing), so I added 3/4 cup water and 1 cup of all purpose flour instead of rye flour.  After a couple of hours, that was bubbling nicely and smelled nice and sour.

Now I need a recipe.  We wanted a dense, sour “peasant” type bread, so I found three or four different recipes and sort of did the “pick and choose ingredients” thing…and came up finally with this:

Peasant Rye Bread

1 cup rye sourdough starter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups rye flour
1 cup warm water

1/4 cup warm water
1 packet (2-1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

1 cup whole wheat flour (I used white whole wheat)
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons KAF rye bread improver (optional – I happened to have some, so I threw it in there)
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons caraway seeds

Combine starter, rye flour, and one cup of the water in a large bowl and mix well. Let stand about 1/2 hour (or longer for an extra-sour rye flavor, but I thought mine smelled about the way I wanted it).

Combine yeast and 1/4 cup warm water in small bowl. Let stand about 5 minutes until foamy. Add to sourdough mixture.

Add the flours, salt, sugar and caraway seeds.  Mix until the dough starts to come together.  I mixed by hand, but you can use a bread machine or a stand mixer for this.  Knead 10 minutes until the dough is smooth (I added about 1/4 cup of AP flour while kneading – the dough remained a little bit sticky, but not unworkable).

Put the dough into a greased bowl (I used butter), cover and let rise about 1 hour in a warm place until doubled.

Punch down dough and knead slightly to get the dough nice and smooth.  Shape into a round loaf and place on a baking stone, a parchment-lined sheet or a greased baking sheet.  Cover loaf lightly and allow to rise until almost doubled (mine took about 40 minutes).  Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Slash the top of loaf and spray with water. Bake at 425° (my oven is convection, so I started at 400°) for 9 minutes. Spray the loaf with water after 3 minutes, again after 6 minutes, and once more at 9 minutes.

Reduce the oven temperature to 400° (convection – 350°) and bake another 20-25 minutes until loaf is browned and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.  I turned off the oven and let the bread remain for another 10 minutes (it wasn’t quite done on the inside, but the top was browned enough). Cool on a rack.

It came out looking pretty good for my first experiment.  Now how did it taste?

It tasted great.  It didn’t spread much sideways, which I liked (I tried one of those “no-knead 5 minute a day” rye bread recipes, and everyone agreed they looked like cowpats – sort of a puddle of dough about an inch tall).

In retrospect, I would have let it rise more the second time, as it is so dense (which is the way we wanted it) I didn’t get much “oven spring”.  It came out of the oven pretty much the same size as it went in, so I think next time I’ll let it rise about an hour, or until it’s as big as I want the finished loaf.  It needs more caraway seeds too, but I only had about 2 tablespoons to add (if that).

I baked it at too high a temperature for the first nine minutes (crust got too brown too quick), so I’m going to cut it down to 375° or until I figure out the peculiarities of my particular oven (and get a good oven thermometer for testing).  Overall it came out great for my first attempt.

He never did finish making the soup last night, the bread is almost gone, so I’ll probably get to try this again today

Thanks to Mama Bear at Gotta Little Space for including us in this week’s Make It From Scratch! Blog Carnival.

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