My Ultimate Caraway

Since I started my explorations of German style mixed flour ( rye/wheat ) breads I was using caraway seeds.

I kept with using a small amount of commercial yeast,   mainly because the scheduling is very simple that way.

And I stuck to using wholegrain rye flour for the rye part - because I like the taste and texture.

Recently I started experimenting with using sourdough only, and using light rye as well as wholegrain rye.

The result is My Ultimate Rye - good volume, elastic, translucent crumb (as far as possible in a 40% rye), hearty taste, ... I could go on. Excellent with smoked salmon or strong cheese.

Here some photos:

This loaf weighs 800g:

Cut open, it filled the kitchen with the most amazing aroma

Here the crumb in greater detail:

And a detail of the crust:

The process follows roughly the "Detmolder" process outlined in the post I mentioned above.

You will find all details in the baking sheet below. I added a column for the "surplus preferment" to account for loss due to fermentation, evaporation and stickiness)

Outline of the process:

Rye sour: Ferment for 15 hours at 26C

Wheat sour: ferment 15 hours at room temperature (was 21C to 24C in my case)

I found that the small percentage of rye makes the wheat sour so much easier to maintain.

Bulk fermentation: 2 hours at 26C

Dough is very loose and sticky - shape either with wet hands or lots of flour

Final proof: 1 hour

Bake: for 800g start at 240C and turn to 200C  after 10 minutes; total baking time 30 min

Happy Baking,

Juergen

Google docs lets you download the spreadsheet with formulas.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkcYHhPxccKtdE9FcE5uU1dDeC00WUQ2dXVtV2ZNVEE