Rye Flour for general use in non general recipes
Hi, I have been baking for 50+ years and a lot of that stuck with using whatever Rye flour I could find locally, which has become impossible lately. Due to fact I can no longer use#25lbs of my favorite rye from a local miller, I am forced to buy smaller amounts on Amazon. I recently bought 15lbs of stone ground rye from Hodgson's mill. It is much coarser than the fine rye I was buying in 25lb bags. And it bakes different. But I have to make it work until I can find a way to get smaller amounts of a finer ground rye at a sensible price. (I was paying around $1.00lb for my fairhaven flour but I was driving to the mill in a valley N of here (Mt. Vernon Washington) to get it.
SOOOO IF my recipe says use medium rye...how much do I sift this stone ground flour to get close to that?? This rye is very much like Bob's red mill and KA pumpernickel flour but a better price. For instance if I need 6 cups of medium rye, would I sift 3 cups of flour to take out most of the bran then add 3 cups of unsifted flour to make a medium flour?
If I could I would stick to myFairhaven mill rye cause it is grown and milled local, but only way to get it in less than 25lbs is to buy it (when it is available) at a co-op 25 miles away and it is of course sitting in open bins and probably not turned over that often in this rye baking desert. (I don't know of a single soul who likes rye bread other than my sons who was raised on it) so I know it isn't popular.
I know how to order and buy from Amazon and KA but I don't like paying more than I need to...or having to ship flour from across the country if I can get locally. So if sifting is what I need to do then I will do so. I just want to get my OLD recipes to work.
BTW..I love black and pumpernickel bread most and have tried some recipes on this web site but it is restrictive when they want this type of flour and that type of flour and I don't have it...so I go back to my everyday stand by's cause I have to eat any misadventures now that family isn't close by to send them home less than stellar examples. LOL!
Here is the weblink: http://www.bobsredmill.com/shop/flours-and-meals/organic-dark-rye-flour.html and I think it may be available on Amazon as well. I use this regularly in sourdough and rustic breads (about 10% by weight, so I don't need much more than the 1 pound bags). It's less coarse than Hodgson's brand.
Thanks for responding Alan. I would have responded sooner but I couldn't find my post even searching forum for my name. Finally I went back over my browser history to find it. WHEW!
I have used Bobs and have some in the cupboard as we speak...but my issue is that I bought 15lbs of the other Hodson Mill Rye in hopes I might get something close to the fine ground Fairhaven Rye (which I thought was stone ground but is very fine and silky). I think I have tried all of the Rye's at Bob's but nothing was like the local rye from Fairhaven or Hummingbird farms that the (almost) local co-op was providing before I found the mill 35 miles away and bought 25lbs on a day trip. So I decided to try the Hodson's Mill and it is coarser than Bob's organic Dark Rye. In the past when using the stone ground rye I would sift out some of the bran in an attempt to get something closer to a "medium" rye that most of my rye recipes request. But I never know how much am I needing to sift to get a medium rye.
So is a medium rye bought from say Bob's had 50% of it's bran removed? Or not? Wouldn't be such an issue except I am working my way thru the Rye Bakers book and of course I don't have the rye's suggested. LOL! And I have had a couple of problems that started with the arrival of the Hodson's Mill rye in that my weighed ingredients didn't give the results expected. Of course I adjusted, but still didn't feel the dough was the consistency I was used to and weather here is pretty much the same 10 months a year. WET and Cool. So only change here was the flour. Well 1 other factor is that I ordered the rye directly from Hodson's and the web site as well as the packaging indicates it is probably fresher ground that anything I've used before. Perhaps that is messing with the formula.
When trying new recipes of bread types I've never had I try hard to be faithful to the recipe by weight so that I can be sure I am getting the intended dough consistency, which is especially important with rye IMHO.