Beautiful baking, Hans!  Your new rye starter sounds like it has a lovely flavor and what a beautiful loaf!  Oh my, the patience you have for a cake this gorgeous and sounds like the flavors mingle all so deliciously together.  I'm a big fan of a caramel, chocolate and nut combination.  What is the flavor of the white frosting is it whipped cream?  What an interesting and lovely cake pattern and thank you for explaining how it was done.  Now if you could just beam me over a big slice! 

Sylvia  

Hans,

I am happy that your new rye starter came out wonderful.  I never had much luck with Hamelman´s formula for creating a rye starter.  The end result was that I had a rye starter that smelled like nail polish remover.  From my previous experience with rye starters, they are one of the most difficult starters to maintain in comparison to a wheat starter.  The caramel cake you made looks beautiful, and I bet it tastes marvelous.  It is evening where I am right now, and I would like a piece of that cake along with a cup of coffee!!!

Carl

see you put all the food groups in too....caramel, chocolate,nuts! It tops my list!

                                                             Audra

but I love the Caramel cake! In fact all your cakes. Are Friberg's pastry books advanced level?  I love to bake, but am not into extemely complicated multi stepped recipes. The cake pattern is really nice, but the caramel creme is the what sets it over the top for me.

Betty

I hope you have some hungry helpers.

I've just recently moved over to using a rye starter as well.  It sounds like you're feeding 1:1:1 at 12 hour intervals?  I was feeding 1:5:5 at 12 hours myself but the weather has cooled lately and I find that 24 hours is working.  I'll be interested as to how it settles in with you.

:-Paul

Sylvia: Yes, the frosting is just heavy cream whipped with powdered sugar (Crème Chantilly). You could go all out with buttercream frosting, but that would make it rather too rich for me, I think. Besides, the soft whipped cream combines well with pillowy sponges and cream inside.

Carl: Thanks! It's the first time I tried Hamelman's procedure, but I picked it since it looked so straight forward and hassle free. I'm curious to hear that you've had trouble with rye starters before, as they're supposed to be among the most robust there is - particularly so since they tend to stick to lower pH levels (and thereby create a "hostile" environment for bad critters), and since rye flour is rich in "good" microorganisms...

Audra: Thanks :)

Betty: Thank you! The caramel cream was just amazing. Pillowy soft, with just a hint of bitterness from the caramel sauce. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me at least, the two Friberg books are very advanced and highly challenging. Some of the stuff in them are just so far out there... But they're still amazing in that whether you bake from them or not, they're a great source of inspiration and information on the various methods involved. The first book is on par with e.g. Suas' ABAP and Gisslen's Professional Baking. An all-round book with the various doughs, batters, creams etc., a brief (and rather incomplete) chapter on bread baking, crackers, cookies, breakfast pastries, decorated cakes and some chocolate work. I think you can check out the table of contents on e.g. Amazon. The second book is where things get really serious. This caramel cake and the raspberry cake I made a few weeks ago, are both from the second volume, and probably the two simplest cakes from the introductory chapter. All recipes are multistep recipes (e.g. "600 gr. buttercream (p. xxx), 2 almond sponges (p. yyy), 360 gr. ganache (p. zzz)..." etc.), which I think is nice, because you can space the process out over a few days quite easily. And I think it's nice to work on preparing one item at the time, and then combine everything at the end. They're my favourite two baking books, and there's a lifetime of baking in those two volumes. By the way, Betty, another book that doesn't get a lot of attention, but is terrific none-the-less, is The Roux Brothers on Patisserie. It is from 1993, but I think it has aged brilliantly, with lots of classic, mostly French pastry items. All recipes are scaled to home-kitchen friendly sizes, the recipes are in weights, and it's got everything from bread and cookies to croissants, puff pastry, choux, tart doughs, ice creams and cakes. Highly recommended :)

Paul: Thanks :) Good point you raise there, Paul. Hamelman instructs on how to make the starter, but not on how to maintain it on a day-to-day basis. He's probably aiming this bit towards commercial operations that always make large sourdough builds for their doughs, and not towards home bakers who, more often, only need to maintain the starter from day to day. I fed it on a 1:1:1 regime for the first week, but when I thought it seemed fully developed and rather stable, I switched to 1:4:4, and eventually 1:5:5 as you, with 12 hr. feeding intervals. I'm not sure if there's a "best way" to go about it, but I think that sticking to a maintenance regime that's close to the way you build ripe sourdoughs is best. In "Bread" for instance, most rye sourdoughs are inoculated by 5% ripe starter, and left to ripen for roughly 16 hours. Ideally, I would like to keep a feeding regimen like that, since I would then get a more or less constant dilution of the ripe starter every time, regardless of whether I'm building a sourdough for baking or if I'm just feeding to maintain the culture. This would hopefully generate a stable, reliable culture. I'm more keen on spacing feedings apart 12 hours (you know, feed the critters before you have your breakfast, and before you have your dinner in the evening), so perhaps a 10 - 15% inoculation would be suitable. I'm not sure how important it really is; it's probably more important that the culture is allowed to ripen fully between each feeding, so it's not diluted and weakened too much over time... I have only made a starter from scratch once before, and this was also an experiment to see how easy or difficult it would be to get another one started. Was it just a fluke that the first one got off, or not? This method seems pretty robust to me: Separate feedings by 24 hours the first days to get things going and to get the pH dropping - that way leuconostoc is fended off. If one just sticks to it and keeps the faith during the lull of days 3 and 4, chances are good that things will pick up during day 5 or 6.

Turns out to be a great combination before and after  the rye starter aquires more "depth."  I wouldn't be afraid to add a little of your older wheat starter to it or add other flours (flours for a few days) along with the rye flour feeds. 

Mini O

Another thought occured to me, would feeding a rye starter only rye chops slow the fermenting process down?  Like when temperatures are higher?  Or would it starve it because the food is large and too slowly available for the beasties?   (Would this be the death of the starter but a source of sourdough flavoring so often seen in liquid form as a true product of a rye starter?)

Mini O

Hans,

I guess it must be the rich microorganisms in the rye flour that makes it difficult to control the rye starter.  The rye starters that I have created (spontaneous) in the past just using rye flour and water have always ended up being too acidic for some reason.  Several years ago I visited a bakery somewhere in southern Germany, and I asked the main baker how he created his rye starter.  He told me to come up to his office, and he made a phone call.  After the phone call, the baker told me to come back several days later.  He told me he placed an order for a rye bacteria culture.  I came back several days later to the bakery, and the main baker gave me the rye bacteria culture.  It was sealed in plastic, and it was a small rye brick.  The baker said I have to break in down in 1 liter of water and mix it with 1kg of rye flour and let it sit for 48 hours at 80 F.  After that, I had a rye starter.  I did what he said, the rye starter smelled almost like vinegar, and it rose 2X in volume.  I was kind of disappointed that he did not have a formula to create a rye starter, but I later found that most bakeries that I visited in southern Germany purchased a rye bacteria culture to create their starter.  The reason most bakers do this is because it will guarantee that it will give their starter the right taste and smell for their breads.  I also visited a large scale bread bakery in southern Germany, and I had a tour of their operations along with other people.  I asked the main baker there if it is possible to create a rye starter spontaneously.  He said no.  However, one person in the tour group said it is possible.  I did encountered one or two bakeries that used a spontaneous rye starter, but when I tasted their breads from these bakeries, the sourness in their breads was barely noticeable.