Hans Joakim's 70% rye
Just wanted to drop a note about how much I enjoyed both making and eating this bread.
This is a quality recipe. Great posts from David and Hans and lots of techniques and tricks in the comments to their posts meant this was like following a well charted path.
This bread surprised me by it's mildness. Was a pleasure to eat. Even the kids got stuck into it!
Technique wise I was fairly faithful to the recipe although I did not initially have enough rye sour, so did a two step build with the second step fed 1:1:1 and then given a further 3.5 hours. Even after that was still around 30g short of rye sour when compared to the recipe, but all was fine. Used my "desem" starter for this bread rather than my regular starter. A 60:40 blend of rye wholemeal:sifted rye was made in order to make a 'medium' rye flour, next time I might adjust that ratio to 70:30 as there was a little bit of guesswork for the extraction rate of the sifted rye flour.
In some ways this bread was a healing experience for me. In my youth I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with rye, loved it as this was a bread my family loved but also some of that caraway seeded rye was just a little too overwhelming. As I grew older rye became this superb bread to take with on hikes as it lasted so well. And now, as I get more into bread making I want to explore rye further, especially some of the interesting Nordic, Baltic and Russian ryes that seem to be so beloved by the people for whom they're their first bread and are tied to family and homeland.
Comments
Very nice! Rye is challenging for me but there's something about it that keeps me playing with it.
Do you have a link to the recipe you used?
Hi David,
I follow your posts with keen interest, and would be curious to see your take on this bread. Your posts have inspired me to play around with scalding, BTW, but so far that has been semi successful at best!
Here are the links:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13552/hansjoakim039s-favorite-70-sourdough-rye
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/16394/hansjoakim039s-favorite-70-sourdough-ryemy-second-baking
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13507/sourdough-rye
-Jon
Thanks very much Jon! Some good tips in that recipe. I had tried a cookie dough paddle first but all the dough just clumped in the centre :p There is an alternative paddle with no struts in the middle though.
It helps a lot to see other people bake rye. Pix can be misleading without a profile crumb shot where the actual loft becomes clear.
I hope to play more with scalds after the holidays. I am thinking to sift whole grain rye and whole grain spelt, scald the bran separately, autolyse the sifted spelt separately, then combine them with the rye sponge and "white rye" (sifted version) at the end with everything optimized on its own.
I think I will take a break next week and force myself to do Benny's Hokkaido milk bread without mucking with his recipe :) and use that as the basis for a bostok.
The sifted bran and scald you describe sounds a lot more easy than your Borodinsky breads, I'm confident it'll turn out great.
By the way, what I was playing around with was adding scalded maize meal porridge to my breads. This link https://www.virtuousbread.com/bread-and-baking/baking-with-scalded-flour/ is what inspired me to try maize, and millet too when I get there one day
I have a suspicion when you say bostock you might be referring to something different to what pops into my head. I'm thinking of a French pastry, well described here by David Lebovitz - https://www.davidlebovitz.com/bostock-almond-paste-recipe-french-pastry-recette/
Scalded corn meal sounds interesting. Something wasn't working well for you?
Yep that's the bostock. I made almond croissants awhile back which are a similar concept. I figured on using the milk bread as the brioche.
Jon that loaf looks perfect to me, The crust is particularly attractive and rustic, love it. What # sieve did you use and how did you figure out what ratio of whole rye to sifted rye equals a medium rye? I ask because I don’t have access to any other rye than whole and now have a #40 sieve and could actually try other rye recipes using medium or light rye flour depending on whether my sieve is sufficiently fine.
Anyhow, very very nice bake.
Benny
Hi Benny,
I don't have a sieve, the rye flour was bought indirectly from a farmer who grows interesting organic produce and has a milling operation of his own.
I couldn't get hold of his estimated extraction rate. The ballpark calculation that I did to come up with the 60:40 ratio is detailed in this post:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/69125/math-blending-medium-rye-flour
Also, think I recall reading here somewhere that a good place to pickup medium rye flour would be a Polish supermarket... or something similar.
Cheers,
Jon
Thanks for that Jon and reminding me about the Polish market suggestion. I should also just sift it with my #40 sieve and see what it looks like, I could try it out and see how it turns out instead of buying yet another flour.
Benny
Might find this link interesting for its info on rye and classifications
https://opentextbc.ca/ingredients/chapter/rye-flour/
Interesting David, thanks for sharing that.
Good info. Now, if only US (and Canadian) millers and flour retailers would publish the ash content of rye flours. Have you've seen the discussion of rye flours on theryebaker.com?
http://theryebaker.com/rye-flour/#more-1157
Ginsberg doesn't directly mention extraction rate here, but he does touch on it in the comments and in his book.
thanks, jonj, for reminding me how much I love this bread. I made it the first time over the summer in an anova electric oven. Yesterday, I baked it again -- in my ancient gas oven at home. I was impatient -- skipping the 5 minute relax on the counter and hustling the shaping -- and it came out looking like a human brain. I couldn't wait this morning and sliced in -- and the taste is already something to think about.
Rob
Looks great! Love that you couldn't wait to cut into it. What a great recipe, isn't it?