I want to try my hand at making a multistage sourdough 100% rye bread that will have 45-55% of the flour prefermented. So it could be quite a bit of sourdough in the final full sour stage. I think I can make it work with my Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home but I need to figure out what's the biggest container I can stuff in that thing. I have come across a picture that showed a 2 liter jar inside this proofer.
I found it on Amazon as "Sourdough Starter Kit with 68oz Jar". It's graduated, too. Alas! It was not meant to be. I found out that apparently Brød & Taylor changed the design of the Sourdough Home somewhere along the line making it smaller (at least inside) so this jar doesn't fit anymore. I measured my proofer inside and confirmed that it would be too tight. Too bad, as I was just about to pull the trigger on this one. There is a smaller, 50oz/1.5 L version of it that might just be able to squeak in but at this point I'm just unsure. But I'm certain that, for my needs, the 2 liter one would be more than enough and the 1.5 liter one could just work and I wonder if there are any other containers that could be used here. I couldn't find anything really definitive. Does any one have any experience or suggestions on this one?
I thought it would be a bit of a shot in the dark as listed dimensions sometimes are off but it worked out pretty well as you can see below. It's a pretty good fit, I'd say. It is an Oggi Stainless Steel Kitchen Canister 62 fl oz from which I removed the lid and the retaining mechanism. They came off easily. The measured capacity of the container is 1.9 liters which is just about what I was looking for. Also I like that it's steel as glass is more fragile and I had an accident in the past where I had to dispose of my starter as the glass jar it was in got damaged while getting put on a granite countertop. It even wasn't a hard landing but I guess the angle at which it hit put too much stress on it. Nice borosilicate jar, too. Glass is OK but you have to be more careful with it.
I'm not sure if a cover is needed since the Sourdough Home closes pretty tightly but I use a shower cap which is not in the picture. I wasn't sure if the steel would be affected by the acidic rye sourdough but it handled it no problem. Overall, I think it's a good addition to my arsenal and it will allow me to better control the fermentation of the multi stage sourdough rye breads.
Hi,
Here is the 2000ml beaker I use for all sorts of temp control mixes. I could use a proofer but a water bath in my crockpot is even better. I use an Inkbird temp controller and it is very precise. The water level just matches the mixture level. I improvise a foil cover or use a plastic dome over the top. Looking forward to your rye bakes!
I used a temperature controller from my brewing days. One thing I really like about the Sourdough Home, though, is that it also cools below ambient. That beaker looks good but wouldn't fit in it.
Thanks! I already used it to make two stage medium rye by Adam Piekarz. It came out great! Maybe I'll make a quick post about it.
Could you send me a link to the recipe you used? I hope you do post your bread. I would love to read more on these breads!
I am glad to hear you are satisfied with the SD Home. I wish there could be a baking box that size and shape too!!
You are right about getting cooler temps. I never thought about that.
It's in Polish, though. Firefox does an OK translation but if you make it and have any questions please ask! This recipe has an error though. In the overall recipe the rye flour should be 375 grams and not 475. Also it should list the water, which is 325 grams. The rye starter used is 100% hydration. One thing to note is that in all of his recipes the temperature of the water in each stage is actually the desired dough temperature for that stage.
Would rye flour 1400 be the fine white rye or a medium rye? I think the color of dark rye would not yield the light crumb that is in the picture.
Maybe this site could have a table of flour equivalents/substitutes? Anyhow, do you have Ginsberg's "The Rye Baker" book? He put a nice table of flour equivalents there. Also, his article about (a lack of) standards for rye flour in the US is worth a read. You can also check out the recipes on that blog. It's like an extension of the book.
I also like the Adam Piekarz blog for Polish and other Eastern European recipes. Most of the Polish recipes in The Rye Baker were lifted from this site, although Ginsberg mistranslated kminek as cumin instead of caraway in the Chleb Sandomierski recipe. I haven't made this particular recipe that you linked, but I have made most of the Adam Piekarz recipes in The Rye Baker, and I also made the Żytni z Dynią i Czarnuszką that isn't in the book
Have you looked at some of the Russian bread blogs?
For example the "Belarusian Sweet Rye" in the book came from the ХЛЕБ & ХЛЕБ blog. At one point, out of curiosity, I searched for the recipes from the book and it turned out many of them were lifted from the various blogs. With one crucial difference, though: the instructions in the book omit the prescribed temperatures. I can only guess as to the reasons for this. Maybe that's why, after making the Belarusian Sweet Rye as directed in the book I wasn't very impressed. Was the bread good? Yes, but after reading the description and following the involved recipe I was expecting more from it but, frankly, I get similar results from Hamelman and his standard sourdough recipe is much simpler. Still, I'm glad I have the book.
I hope you enjoyed Adam's recipes. As for me, since I now have the means to control the temperature of the different stages, I made his Chleb Żytni Sitkowy but I scaled the recipe to 1500 grams to fit in my 9x4 Pullman pan. It came out fabulous even if a bit too tall as the amount of dough was a guess. It's a definite keeper.
I'll make that Belarusian rye again but not before I have the means of maintaining 65 Celsius as is required for some stages. The Sourdough Home goes up to only 50 Celsius. Anyway, I'm looking forward to making the recipes from those blogs exactly as they're written and hoping Ginsberg (or maybe Hamelman?) releases a book with the real recipes. It's great that there are those blogs but being able to hold a book and open it anywhere, anytime just hits different for me.
Do you know if there are any Baltic or Ukrainian bread blogs? German and Russian ones were easy enough to find but not having much luck for the others.
I have also had difficulty finding Baltic and Ukrainian bread baking blogs. I wonder if it was the influence of the Soviet-era GOST recipes on the other non-Russian Soviet states. I would really like to find some traditional rye bread recipes from these countries, especially Estonia and Ukraine as they are underrepresented in The Rye Baker and in the Russian blogs.
With regard to rye scalds, I recently tried an experiment. I was making this recipe and thought I would try a "lazy scald" as alluded to in the recipe. I added boiling water to the scald ingredients in a wide-mouth insulated container (not actually a Thermos but an old Aladdin brand). After the temperature cooled to ≈70 °C, I added 5% diastatic rye malt (maybe too much?) and closed the lid. I occasionally stirred the mixture and found that the temperature held pretty well for a couple hours and was mostly above 55 °C. The mixture thinned considerably so I figured that some of the starch was converted to sugar. I'll have to try this again and pre-warm the Aladdin with boiling water.
Another more involved way is to use a slow cooker water bath with an inexpensive temperature controller. I got a small 3-qt slow cooker for $12 and an Inkbird controller for less than $30. The other option I've used is the Keep Warm-Normal setting of my 3-qt InstantPot; that setting maintains a 63–65 °C temperature.
a slightly tangential question: I know that some of the enjoyable recipes I've tried from the rye baker blog were filched and lightly adapted from various baking sites in other languages. In some cases, the blog credits them. But you both seem to be saying that some recipes in the book were as well. It's one thing to poach things online -- this seems to be part of the ethos of the web. But in a book? To me this seems, well, kind-of not right, no?
Rob
I reexamined several of the Polish recipes in The Rye Baker and compared them with the recipes on the Adam Piekarz blog. The ingredient list is usually identical but the deviation is found in the process. The blog recipes often have multi-stage pre-ferments that resemble traditional Detmolder conditions. Ginsberg modifies these to room temperature with different timings. Or he may change the sour culture inoculation quantity in the pre-ferment.
I'm not an attorney, so I looked on TFL for copyright info for recipes. One thread seemed to indicate that ingredients can be copied and if the process is changed, even ever so slightly, then it is not copyright infringement. Ginsberg does recommend the Adam Piekarz blog in the Sources and Resources section of The Rye Baker, but he does not say that the recipes were from that blog. I guess I would have acknowledged that fact in the book, but then when word gets out, who would buy the book?
I am not a lawyer either, but according to the Copyright Alliance (https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/)
This is US- specific and copyright laws are different in other countries.
TomP
Thanks for the info, Tom. That reminds me that process chemistry patents are much more difficult to obtain than composition of matter patents, likely for the same reasoning. Also, companies often decide that maintaining the trade secret far outweighs the patent protection.
thanks for your fine thoughts, alcophile & TomP
I'm not a lawyer either, thankfully. Honestly, though, I wasn't thinking about legality here, but rather the ethics of reporting provenance. For sure, if everything from anadama and borodinsky to yufka and zopf was held hostage by copyright, it's likely none of us would even be able to bake them without paying a fee. At the same time, simply simplifying some of the parameters of someone else's recipe and calling it your own hardly seems appropriate. I would hope that the bakers who write bread-books would go a bit further than a line in the fine print at the back of their books and show some reverence for the bakers and bakeries that led them to their copyrighted takes on these age-old traditions.
Rob
This really should be moved - Off Topic is a good place. Enjoy!
The Brod&Taylor proofing box can maintain a temperature range of 70–195F / 21–90C. You would probably use the "Slow cook" mode for that.
TomP
but it only goes up to 50 Celsius.
Oh, doesn't it have the slow-cooker mode? Mine does, but I'm pretty sure it's not the very first version.
I believe the slow cooker option is an addition to later models as I'm pretty sure I'd get it back when I bought mine if it was available.