November 4, 2018 - 1:56am
Rye bread proven?
I have made a few 100% rye breads lately and have consistently overproved them resulting in a loaf that tastes great but is sunken. The latest experiment was using Emmanuel Hadjiandreou’s recipe for a dark rye bread. How do I tell if rye bread is fully proved - I’ve read the poke test posts - how do they apply to rye?
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Are they over proofed or under baked?
Hi Lotus,
the poke test, I believe, is for doughs that contain a fair bit of wheat. You develop the gluten network, until the dough is springy, elastic. After letting it rest and rise for a while you test the gluten network: as acidity goes up (i.e. pH goes down), the enzymes of the wheat start to become active and begin to break down the gluten. The poke test will tell you when it's time to bake: there will still be some resistance, but not much -- the elasticity of the gluten network is about to go. That's when you need to bake.
With a 100% rye, however, there is no gluten network. I assume you bake those in a tin. Do you keep your starter in a cylindrical glass jar, and have watched it rise and fall? Can you recognize the stage where it is fully risen, its surface no longer "domed" but flattening out, before it starts to fall?
If you make a little extra dough and put it in a small cylindrical jar, cover and keep it next to the tin so they have the same ambient temperature and everything, then you can watch it like your starter and bake your bread when that stage occurs.
You can then also make a mental note what the dough in your tin looks like and how far it has risen, for your next bakes :-)
Happy baking
tsp
of course you don't want to wait until the dough in the jar starts to flatten out (the way I wrote about the starter earlier was misleading)! But ideally bake shortly before that happens.
tsp
The standard test is to watch for the bubbles to start popping on the surface. That, however, requires a reasonably well shaped loaf, and may not work if the dough is excessively wet in which case the solution is to time and adjust, until you get a desired result.
Do you have Hamelman's Bread? He has a great rye section. Rye is very active, and high percentage rye breads develop very quickly. The Hamelman book is very instructive. The Rye Baker is also excellent.
If you mean it is as flat as you started out then you're onto the simple correction of shaping your loaves. With a wet spatula shape a mound down the middle of the loaf squishing the dough from the edges up into the middle. A 100% rye tends to rise strait up. If it starts out flat, it will rise flat. How wide is the baking pan, often a narrow pan supports a shape better.
If you look at the crumb shot and the dough has indeed fallen or shows a sinking crumb with a dense area about a centimeter up from the bottom crust, then yes, it is indeed overproofed.
Several tricks, make the dough gauge as preciously mentioned or make a very smooth surface on the loaf. Watch the surface and the amount of rise. The surface will begin to push up from rising bubbles as the rye matrix weakens leaving a progressively bumpy surface. When a few small bubbles pop on the surface leaving a "pinhole" then it is high time to get the dough into a hot oven.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/15736/mini039s-favorite-rye-ratio?page=2#comment-109761