Yesterday I had the chance to do a bake of Eric's Favorite Rye following Floyd * Baking Eric's Favorite Rye [1] * and Andy's suggestion *here* [2] that it would be a nice way to honor the memory of Eric Hanner. Eric was a great guy and friend so of course I wanted to make any sort of contribution I could towards that. Reading through Eric's formula and procedure for the first time in quite a while I remembered why I'd never baked his bread before....caraway...lots of it! Nevertheless, this bread was going to be made, I'd just dial the spice back a bit to suit my tastes. Other than that I wanted to stick as closely as possible to the original formula and procedure and produce what I feel is a classic deli style rye bread. In the original post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/5076/eric039s-fav-rye#comment-25620 [3] Eric leaves no doubt as to how he intended to use the bread, namely for corn beef sandwiches and I'm sure his home cured and smoked pastrami as well. I can tell you that now I've made the bread and made a CB sandwich from it I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better bread to use for stacking warm slices of corned beef on top of. In fact I couldn't. This is incredibly tasty bread, with a soft but slightly chewy crumb and crust, and loaded with flavour from the preferment, the onions, and yes the caraway. I like  Eric's Rye so much I've decided it will be the bread for my corned beef and pastrami sandwiches from here on. 

Thanks Pal!

Cheers,

Franko

A few notes about the formula (below) and procedure:

As mentioned I stayed as close as possible to the original formula and procedure, trying to make the bread as Eric outlined in the link [3] above. There were a few minor exceptions however that I want to mention.

• Because of scheduling the preferment was left for longer than the 8 hours indicated in the original procedure, going for 12 hours total. The bread didn't taste overly sour to me, just slightly tangy.

• The onions used were fresh, slightly caramelized on low heat in a covered pan. I don't have anything against dried onions, I simply didn't have any on hand.

• Before the final mix the bread flour and water had a 40 minute autolyse.

• The caraway was reduced to 1.8% from 2.5%

• The baking temps and time varied slightly in that I started the bake (with steam) at 450F/232C for 10 minutes, reducing the heat to 385F/196C for the remaining 25 minutes. The bread was baked to an internal temperature of 210F/98.8C.

Other than the autolyse I can't think of anything that would improve upon the original procedure that Eric wrote up, so as a good friend of mine says "not for changing!"

Link to working spreadsheet *Here* [4]