A Big Ol' Rye

Where does the time go?  In the considerable time since I last managed to get a post together I have mostly been baking one bread over and over.  So here it is: a big ol’ rye.

This bread is all about keeping it simple – nothing fancy here.  It is about 30% whole rye, about 70% hydration (depending on the flours), shaped into one big round.  It is scaled to be just within the capacity of my Bosch Compact mixer and just fit on my baking stone (there have been some close calls with the stone for sure).  The final dough weight is a little over 2 kg.  The only downside to the big loaf is that it takes hours to completely cool!

The process:

Build the starter using 375g whole rye four, 375g water and 45g starter.  Mix it all up and let it ferment 12-16 hours at room temp.  This fermentation time could be shorter I suppose, but I like a tang to my sourdough ryes.

For the dough use all of the starter, 900g bread flour, 500g water and 23g salt.  This gets mixed for 10 minutes on speed 1.  I stop the mixer 3-4 times to scoop the dough out and flip it over so that it all gets worked. 

The dough gets a bulk ferment of 3-4 hours at 75⁰F with a stretch and fold at about the 1 hour mark.  After shaping one big round the final fermentation usually takes another 2-3 hours.

The loaf is baked at 450⁰F with steam for 15 minutes then finished at 420⁰F for 45 minutes.

And that’s it.  This bread freezes very well so I end up with at least a couple weeks’ worth of sandwiches.  I have added a handful of flax meal or nuts on occasion just to liven things up, but I always come back to the basic bread and am never disappointed (Well, except once when I knew my starter was in a funk but baked anyway… the chickens ate very well that week).

Marcus