Detmolder rye bread
I made several times this particular rye bread, but I never bothered to take pictures before; moreover this time it came out better than the other times.
This rye bread is very particular because it's not a traditional bread in any sense: it was studied at the Detmold insititute -based in Germany- to take out all the taste components of rye. It's prepared in 3 (actually 4) stages to develop yeasts, acetic acid and lactic acid (in this order) in each of the 3 refreshments preliminary to the final dough.
The recipe I followed is explained on the very excellent Samartha's site here [1]that also provides a very easy calculator [2].
I wanted to use 500 grams of flour with a final hydratation of 85% plus 2% of salt, thus I ended adding 425 grams of water and 10 grams of salt (~920 gr of dough is the ideal mass for my 12 inches plum-cake form).
The refreshments were done as follows:
-10 gr of rye sourdough, 20 gr of flour, 30 grams of water, fermented for 6 hours at 26°C
-15 gr of the previous levain, 75 gr of flour, 45 gr of water, fermented for 24 hours at 24°C
-all the previous levain (135 gr that almost didnt' rise because it was too stiff), 202 gr of flour, 203 gr of water fermented for 3 hours at 30°C
(it rose a lot, it more than tripled).
final dough with 10 gr of salt dissolved in 169 gr of water and mixed with the starter, 216 gr of flour.
I kneded briefly in the air just to get a homogeneous mass, than I put the dough in a bread form and let it rise at °28C for 2 hours.
Baked at 200°C for 50 minutes, the 30 minuted with lid on. This time I preheated the oven, but next time I'll go back to the usual cold-oven method because the bread came out a bit drier than I'm accustomed to (this time it was exactly almost as moist as ordinary white bread, that I don't like).
If you like sour bread this one is for you! It's perfect except for 2 points: the over-baking said above and the lack of the sweet component that comes with a hot soaker. Next time I'll modify the formula using a part of the third levain as soaker.
The picture came out a bit darker than the real thing because I applied too many corrections ;)
This bread really deserves a test, it's delicious.