Organic Rye Flour

Check out "Sourdough Home'. You'll find great information on starters and all things sourdough (http://www.sourdoughhome)

To answer your question, I have used Arrowhead Farms Organic Rye. I have found this brand (in Arizona) at quite a few major food stores. You might also try to locate organic rye flour in healthfood stores or a Trader Joe's if you have one near you.

Not absolutely sure about pumpernickle, but I think dark rye flour is used to make pumpernickle bread. If you find organic pumpernickle flour, I think you should be fine.

From what I understand Rye (and organic whole wheat) flours make very healthy, active starters and contain large quantities of the micro organisms that you need to geet your culture going.

There are many on this forum who can answer your question more authiritively than I am able to. You'll find an email address for Mike Avery at Sourdough Home. I'll bet he would be glad to answer this for you.

Hi loafgirl,

Is there such thing as Organic Rye flour for the first 2 days, or is there something else I can use? 

If I understand what you are trying to do, you want to bake organic sourdough bread, and using PR's method, that requires using rye flour to build the culture, and since you are making organic bread, the rye flour should be organic. Is that a correct understanding?

And oh yes there is organic rye flour. It could be whole, or medium, or light, or white rye, and the rye berries would have been grown organically. The varieties I just mentioned vary by how much bran and germ are left in after the milling. (I don't know if PR specifies whole rye or not.)

Pumpernickel generally refers to a coarse milling of rye berries and retains all the bran and germ.

The point of using whole grain, like whole wheat or whole rye, is that the bran contains more of the wild yeast that fosters your sourdough culture. Organic helps the process, since no pesticides have killed off any wild yeast on the grain.

However, all that to the side for the moment, you also wrote:

I have a nice starter going for the Sourdough but it is not Organic.

If you are not baking rye bread, but simply want to convert to organic grain, you need only refresh your starter with organic flour. After some number of refreshments, the percentage of non-organic grain will be small, and your starter will be for all intents and purposes organic. From there, just bake the bread with all ogranic flours, and you've got completely organic bread. If on the other hand you seek to bake organic rye, then by all means you will need some organic rye flour!

Different rye recipes specify different percentages of rye to wheat flour, so if you're going to bake organic rye bread, look at some recipes. I would recommend looking at dmsnyder's blog on TFL for his recipes, and also Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread for this purpose.

Hope this helps,

David