May 19, 2020 - 10:39am
Can I simply swap the Whole Wheat Flour with Rye Flour?
Hi guys,
I will like to attempt this recipe but I am out of Whole Wheat Flour. Same for the stores. I wonder if I should swap it with more AP flour or Rye flour or half of each?
AP Flour 311gr
Whole Wheat Flour 89gr
Rye Flour 44gr
Liquid Levain 89gr
Water (75°F) 311gr
Fine salt 10gr
This is the Multi-grain bread recipe from The Bouchon cookbook.
Thank you!
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Rye flour behaves differently than most standard 'whole grain' flours, so I would be hesitant to up the amount in your recipe noted above, unless you are wanting to make rye bread. If you swap in AP flour for the whole wheat, the rye percentage would still be more than 10% of the dough (without knowing what kind of flour is in your starter).
Mine is an all purpose flour starter. I upped it just a little, replacing the rest of the whole wheat with all purpose.
How much do you like the flavor of rye? More rye will make a denser loaf, with a stronger rye flavor. The dough will be a bit stickier. But it should be a fine bread! Subbing in AP for the whole wheat is maybe a safer choice, and will give you a dough that's a little easier to work with and a fluffier loaf.
I probably need something easier to work with as I'm only a beginner. I rounded the rye flour up to 50 grams, the rest are substituted with all purpose flour.
I use rye alot and enjoy it. Your question would result in a 1/4 to 1/3 flour weight rye loaf. Go for it.
I regularly bake 50% and higher rye formulae and enjoy them.
Rye does behave very differently vs. wheat, in that rye has much less gluten and handles differently during kneading (stretch-fold) and shaping. What you are asking is doable, and is done by many of us.
I am glad to know that can be done :)
Thanks for the comments guys. I have some updates and a few new questions.
In the end, I went with this:
AP Flour 394gr
Rye Flour 50gr
Liquid Levain 89gr
Water (75°F) 311gr
Fine salt 10gr
The recipe also uses a soaker: 33gr each of Rolled Oats, Sesame Seeds, Quinoa, Flaxseeds, Hulled Sunflower Seeds. All of these are soaked in 100ml of water. Everything gets added to the mix after 20 mins on low in the mixer.
I also omitted the 3gr (almost 1 tsp) of instant yeast.
There is a Stretch and Fold after the 20 minutes of mixing. 30 minutes into it, I feel that it need another S&F so I did that.
05.20 1 After SnF.jpg
Unknowingly, it had bulk fermented for four hours by the time I feel that the dough has doubled in size with visible bubbles at the sides and bottom.
Black line on cling wrap on the left is the level I indicated after the 20 minutes of mixing.
05.20 2 After 4 hours.jpg
05.20 4 After 4 hours.jpg
05.20 5 After 4 hours.jpg
My questions are:
Off to shape the bâtards now!
Thanks again!
Rye forms a very sticky dough and the temptation is to add more flour. DO NOT add additional flour. Rather, handle dough with DAMP (not wet) hands.
Rye also makes a denser crumb. The sandwich loaf texture may not be as fluffy but you have enough AP flour to make a nice sandwich bread. The trick is not to over proof-it should raise just fine.
Post some pics of final laof and crumb! Should be different but just fine.
Here's the crumb shot. My dough stuck to the dusted linen. I should have dusted it with rice flour instead.
I find it extremely hard to pick up the dough from the linen to transfer. Do you have any tips for this?
IMG_20200520_204025_803.jpg
What a nice bread! You did so well with it. That crumb looks lovely. Great job paying attention to the dough and letting the bulk continue until it was fully ripe.
That are different ways to transfer dough out of a proofing vessel depending if you're transferring it onto a peel, a cookie sheet, into a cold Dutch oven, into a hot Dutch oven, etc. What are you putting your dough in/on?
Thank you for the encouragement!
It's meant to go from linen to a transfer peel, seam side up, and then to the oven peel, seam side down, then to the baking stone.
As the recipe makes two bâtards, I have one go into the dutch oven and another on a cast iron skillet. The one on the skillet browns too much too quickly. I prefer the effect of the Dutch oven bâtard. Do you think I can adapt the recipe to make one boule instead? I prefer to bake one in the dutch oven this way. Will the seeds make the dough too heavy?
At 450 grams of flour it's an average loaf, not huge. The seeds certainly didn't seem to weigh it down too much in the bulk!
My intuition is that it would be fine, but I don't have much experience with mix-ins other than porridge. You could also scale the dough back a bit and see how it does, then increase the size in later bakes.
Are you putting the dough in to a cold pot or a hot one?
And I'm still not clear on your transfer: what you do, not what it says in the book. How are you moving the dough?
Lots of folks seem to like putting the dough onto a parchment with extra long corners so they can lift the dough and lower it into the Dutch oven after scoring.
Nice looking loaf. From the original post it seemed you wanted to go bigger with the rye. What you ended up with is a wheat loaf with a bit of rye. It looks great and it probably tastes great. Try >50% rye. It's a different product, and delicious.