spontaneously fermented rye bread

How much boiling water (proportional) did she add?

Seriously stir for 30 minutes eh? And what does she mean by keeping it warm for 3 days? Like proofer warm or room temp warm?

I may be interested in this venture...

Water content, assuming whole rye flour, enough to make the final dough around 90% hydration for the first attempt.  Then adjust up or down for future trials until you find the sweet spot.

I'm not sure why the injunction to stir for 30 minutes, unless it's to keep the flour suspended in the water for more even gelatinization.  It doesn't seem as though getting all of the flour uniformly wet would require that much stirring.

As to warmth, probably proofer warm.  Grandma may have had a wood-burning cook stove with a proofing cabinet attached when this approach was first developed.

Just guesses, mind you.

Paul

Deep in my memory I recall seeing something along this line before. When you consider how fermentable rye flour is, I can see how this could, or would happen under the right conditions. Assuming Grandma's rye flour was recently milled, whether it was here (NA) at the time or in the Old Country, it's seems entirely possible.The result would be as natural an organically leavened loaf as one could imagine.The 30 minute stirring indicates a very slow and full gelatinization of the starches, similar to making polenta, allowing it maximize and create some structure for the  CO2 to work against.Guessing that salt was added at some point to the mix to make it palatable? I have to think this would be a very stodgy bread by today's standards, even for a  modern 100% rye bread, but the idea of it is fascinating. Thanks for posting this!

Franko  

used a more traditional recipe of keeping back a batch of old rye dough and using that as leavening for the next batch of bread. It was a very small amount when compared with the mass of bread that she used to make - no more than 100 grams, most of it stuck to the sides of the wooden bread bucket and scraped loose as needed. She baked the bread in a very hot wood fired oven, which doubled as a stove and house warmer in the winter.

Sadly I am too young to remember the taste, but my grandfather assures me that this was how bread was baked in most of northeastern Lithuania.

Read about Lithuanian bread here: http://ausis.gf.vu.lt/eka/food/bread.html

 The second recipe in the post is Scalded Rye Bread, or Plikyta ruginė duona.  The method is similar to that of your friend's Lithuanian grandmother.

in here. This process was a very common way to make rye bread not long ago, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia as it make its own leaven by following this process, sort of like the ww starter that J Ortiz is famous for but this is pretty much a dump and wait.  I have it on my to do list, which seems to get longer instead of shorter.  i don't know if Mini has done a post on this or not but I bet she has done it many times and I remember her comments on this process in at least one thread here.

I'm also guessing less stirring will be fine,

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/11812/rye-amylase

Me? I like the results I get from my sd rye starter.  If I didn't have it, and was pressed for time, I might be very tempted to start up a starter and loaf in this manner but would expect a more brick like crumb that improves over time as the starter ages.  I think of it along the same lines as using soaked aged altus to make pumpernickel type ryes.  A similar action is taking place using gelled rye to feed yeasts and bacteria present in the (added unscalded) flour.

The method I use is to combine a full sour [18 hours ferment time] with a scald to form what is known as a "Sponge".   4 more hours of fermentation, then add salt and flour to sponge for the final paste.

A

HI DA,

For Moscow Rye scald is 20% of the total flour [13% Wholemeal Rye and 7% Red Rye Malt], with 30% of flour in the sour, giving 50% total pre-fermented flour

Best

Andy