100 % Rye with Rye Berry Scald, Walnuts, Sunflower, Pepitas and Aromatic Seeds

After last week’s brick bake of a no levain pumpernickel Lucy decided to get some sourdough in there and cut back on the long, low bake by 5 hours and upping the heat.  It is loosely based on Mini Oven’s fine rye bread here Mini's 100% Dark Rye & Chia Recipe ...Love at 104% hydration.

I say loosely but it was worse than that.   We mixed the salt and water with the dough flour first, then added the seeds and nuts and mixed that and then added the levain.  We also made a rye starter from scratch our pumpernickel way starting on Sunday for Thursday mixing and baking on Friday.  We used 27.5% pre-fermented flour.

The starter was made using 30 g of rye with 25 g of water.  After 24 hours we fed it with 30 g of rye and 25 g of flour.  At the end of 48 hours we cut the mix in half and fed each half 30 g of rye and 25 g of water and stirred it every 6 hours after it doubled each time.  At the 72 hour mark we fed each the same mix one more time and then refrigerated both after 6 hours when they had doubled again.  We used one of these starters for this bread at 220 g after it had been retarded for 24 hours.

We dropped the chia seeds and the hydration to 100%.  We didn’t use an altus either but did make a rye berry scald and we added caraway, anise, coriander and fennel for aromatics along with some walnuts, pepitas and sunflower seeds.

We used a different pan, cocktail size, sprayed with non-stick and lowered the temperature after 15 minutes from 400 F to 350 F and baked it an hour and 10 minutes total. Instead of using gargantuan pine nits to cover we used sunflower seeds and pepitas instead.  We also baked it for 40 minutes covered in a combo cooker with a bit of water in the bottom before uncovering to brown the crust.

We also retarded the dough for 8 hours after panning and bagging and let the dough finish proofing on the counter for 4 hours before baking.  Other than that, we followed Mini Oven perfectly by using whole rye, water and salt for the important part.

One gf the things you miss when baking in a combo cooker is the marvelous smell of 100% rye bread baking - one of the greatest smells in the whole world.  But, when the lid came off ….wow …..it was worth the wait.   This bread did puff up some and crack while baking which is always a good sign and way better than having it collapse in the oven.  Once the bread hit 205.5 F on the inside we took it out of the pan and left it on the stone with oven off and the door ajar for 5 minutes to dry out the crust that had been covered by the pan.  Once totally cooled it was wrapped in plastic for 24 hours to let the moisture redistribute and soften the crust.and make slicing easier.

I didn't get around to making a panettone this year but I did get a chocolate chip one as a gift.  Not SD and not as good as home made, but still fine with French Silk ice cream on top

The moisture redistributed well and the bread was easy to cut in 1/4" slices with no gumminess or crumbling.  For a whole rye bread with lots of stuff in it, I was sort of taken back by how mild the taste was.  The bread spice was subtle at 2%.  If I didn't know better I could call this a light deli rye.  For those who don't like high percent rye breads, you might like this.  Lucy says this bread would be better with a baked scald, more bread spice and baked pumpernickel style to really bring out the flavor = she might be right

The formula is

100% Whole rye freshly home milled  

100% Water

2% Salt

2% Aromatic seeds

6.25% each sunflower and squash seeds

12.5% Walnuts

27.5% pre-fermented flour

A salad goes well with anything on the plate