The Greenstein-Snyder Gang’s Rye Sour Bread

Not to be confused with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Gang.
 
Having no experience with rye sour levains, I thought it was high time to get on the stick and rustle me up a dose.  I think the idea came to me after seeing Varda’s recent comment and quest for NY rye.  So off I went.  

With no First Clear flour, I relied on the Pearson’s Square method to combine differing grains with differing protein percentages in order custom create the high protein percentage that I wanted, somewhere around 15.3%.  The Bread Flour itself is at 13.3% (Pillsbury) and the Vital Wheat Gluten at 56%.  In order to get what I wanted, the Pearson’s Square told me that I need a mix of 95.3% Bread Flour and 4.7% VWG. (95% & 5% for practical purposes here).
 
All I had to start with was my standard kinda-does-everything stiff levain.  Just the discarded throwaways from prior builds, but which I have found can perpetuate themselves endlessly – and rather quickly.  Starting out with not much more in my container than scrapings of maybe two dozen grams I did two builds with just rye and water.
  
Here is the container with 100g of fresh feed mixed together with the 20 or so grams of leftover levain.  On the left is the just fed mix, on the right is 3 hours later.  I discarded ~half and then did another 100g feed, from which I used 50g to start my rye sour levain according to David Snyder’s 3 stage build schedule.

Here is what the rye sour looked like just after the first stage feeding, and what it looked like after the 3rd stage at completion.  For the first two stages, the sour matured at the 3 hour mark, and at the third stage it was completely domed over in just under 2 1/2 hours, well ahead of the recommended time of 4-8 hours.  That’s 750g of rye sour in that second picture.

I made three 475g batards out of them instead of the two ~750g loaves that David displays.  On the left, they are finished fermenting and ready to be glazed and scored.  These babies grew like something out of sci-fi movie!  

This step took only 45 minutes instead of 1 hour to complete.  On the right, they have received the glaze and are scored.  I decided to score 2 of the 3 length-wise (not wise!), the 3rd across the top as recommended.  The shaping was actually better than what's in the picture, but these grew so rapidly that they wound up mis-shaping each other - as evidenced by the middle fellow who was squeezed from both sides.

There are the kids underway.

And the finished product.  

The caraway seeds are there, but non existent in the photos.  This is a significantly darker crumb than the rye breads we had growing up in the Bronx, where all three bakeries within 4 blocks of my street sold them.  The crust isn’t anywhere near as “crackly” as those either, in fact a bit on the softer side.  But for the most part they do taste of the rye bread that I knew growing up.  I’m not that excited about the look of these, but for a first time, I’ll take it.  And that just means that there is room for improvement!

Lessons learned:

• As I already knew, rye doesn’t act much like AP flour.  It is thirsty and my French Folds required much more muscle to perform.  In a home mixer, I can imagine the motor groaning and quitting.
• Note to self - make two 750g loaves next time, not three at ~500g.
• Don’t plan on doing much else once the final dough mixing starts.  The action between prep, clean up as I went along and attending to the next step was almost constant due to the proximity of the steps and rapidity of the dough’s final rise.
• Therefore have as much mise en place as possible.
• In general, the dough was much easier to handle than I had anticipated, knowing rye's sticky reputation.
• Consistent with my warm-ish kitchen and generally spunky levain base, everything happens faster, and the timings for most steps are shorter duration. This I well knew going in, and timed it as such.
• Don’t bother with fancy, alternate scoring.  It looks as though rye doughs have a minimal oven spring when it comes to a grigne.
• Once the rye sour is domed and ready for incorporation, the entire activity can be completed in mere hours.  Total time for the final mix, shape, rise, & bake was under 2 1/2 hours.  Along with the third stage build, all activity today was under 5 hours.
• I would have liked to have baked these longer, to get a better crust coloration, but they didn’t seem to want to be cooperative, and they were finished being baked without being willing to take another deeper shade. 
  

alan