U.S. Army Rye Bread

Just HAD to share this recipe from a CD I bought full of old U.S. Army recipes.  Luckily enough, even though each recipe is for 100 servings, all the recipes (including the baking ones) are by weight as well as volume.

Here's their rye bread recipe (PDF), and here's the baker's formula (I converted the fresh yeast to instant yeast, which can be mixed in w/the dry ingredients):

69.4 AP flour

30.6 Rye flour

59.7 Water

2.6 Shortening

2.6 Salt

2.1 Sugar

0.9 Caraway seed

0.46 Instant yeast

165.76 Total

Here's the results doing it strictly "by the book" (except for the instant yeast)

Feel free to experiment - I'm still fine tuning, but the main changes I've made are:

1)  MORE WATER = a bit less dense

2)  Olive oil instead of shortening (a bit healthier)

3)  Adding KAF's Rye Bread Improver (I've been using ~1.5-3 %) - a bit of a cheat, but it's still all ingredients I can explain to an 8 year old child (one of my rules of thumb for ingredients)

Enjoy, and let me know if you try it, or variations on the theme!

P.S. - Yes, they DO have creamed chipped beef on toast as a recipe on the CD ROM - I'm not quite brave enough to try that one, though.  You can buy the CD for ~$20 here if you're intrigued, or see a more limited edition at the U.S. Army Quartermaster School's web site (guess where Army cooks are trained?) here (PDF).