Schwarze Muckel Problem(s)
I made an attempt at the Schwarze Muckel bread on the Homebaking.at website (Schwarze Muckel). This was probably the first bread I have made that was nearly inedible. The crust was thick and nearly burnt, but the inside was split and very gummy/underbaked. The crumb of the loaf was also not the rich, dark brown color as in the photos on the website.
The process includes a medium rye meal sourdough, an old bread scald, and the final dough. I scaled the recipe to 1100 g from 2131 g. I did not have a stand mixer at the time so most of the steps were mixed by hand. I did try to mix the rye meal sourdough with a hand mixer for several minutes in place of the 10 minutes with a stand mixer. I used unfermented red rye malt for the dark rye malt. I could not mix the final dough by hand for as long as was specified by slow speed mixer. I also think I overshot the proof by 15–20 minutes.
The other problem I had with the recipe was the baking instructions: bake at 230 °C reduced to 190 °C with steam; total time is 210–240 minutes for a 1350-g dough piece. No time is specified for the 230 °C portion, nor how long should steam be applied. I baked for 180 minutes total; the internal temperature was 205 °F and the crust was already burnt. I know that I made unavoidable mixing deviations to the recipe, but I have made other high-percentage rye breads by hand before and I have had reasonable success.
If I try this again, I would like to have an idea what I need to change. I have a stand mixer now, so that variable could be controlled. I still wonder about the baking time, temperature, and steam duration. Does this need to be baked in a roasting bag to trap steam?
Thanks!
The colour is very different so i'm thinking you haven't used exactly the same ingredients. Did you use the same malt or did you swap it out for the beet syrup?
I'm not saying this is the answer but that is the most obvious thing so starting with that.
Secondly... did you buy rye meal medium or did you approximate it when grinding? Take a look here.
I can understand you wishing to make this bread. Looks delicious! Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Thanks for the response. I used medium rye meal from NYBakers.com (Stanley Ginsberg's former retail outlet).It's probably as close to German Roggenschrot mittel that I will find in the US.
Because I'm in the US, I didn't order dark rye malt from Germany. I used Fawcett's red rye malt, which looked similar in color to the images of roggenmalz dunkel on the German sites I visited (hobbybäcker.de). I do have a chocolate rye malt that I could use that is nearly black.
I think most of my problems are technique and/or procedure related, but I'm so far off the expected outcome, I'm not sure where to begin..
then I think we can be certain you have used the correct thing. If not then very close. I suppose the malt is not make or break. It is a puzzle. Does look over baked which can cause a thick crust and fault lines but why so far off? I shall have to put my thinking cap on. Will be following this thread closely! Hope you find your answer.
As an after thought... it doesn't specify but is the old bread scald you used rye bread as well? Again, I should hardly think it'll alter the outcome greatly but old bread scalds are rye especially in rye breads.
P.s. Do you think it's under fermented, too dense and couldn't bake through properly? So under fermented but the crust over baked causing a thick crust, fault lines and gooey centre? Or over fermented but same problem as too dense? Or when you scaled up you made a mistake?
Hi! Thank you for baking this bread. I was curious about it and would like to bake it as well.
The color varies due to variation in rye bran color. Some whole rye kernels give nearly black crumb yet other varieties and cultivars of rye will give you gray or light brown or nearly white (white rye variety, i.e rye with very light yellow colored bran) crumb.
It also depends on the coloring from dark beetroot syrup or dark malt (malted grain, flour) and how well, how darkly roasted were your old bread crumbs.
Most importantly, it depends on the degree of fermentation, and how well your scald was hydrolysed, was it fully hydrolyzed at your room temperature? and on slow bake.
Your loaf looks both too dense, almost no pores are visible, due to the lack of water, and severely overbaked, it is evident from the cracks on the sides of the loaf and inside its crumb, and the crust is too thick. The illustration of the loaves on the linked website shows thin crusts, smooth side crusts, cracked top crusts (soft, moist dough opens like so), open pores (enough water). They placed their loaves into hot oven and immediately set temperature at 190C, they also loaded more dough into their oven than you, so it was not burnt, it immediately cooled the oven down.
Steaming could be done by spraying the tops with water and covering them with foil in the first 15min of baking.
You baked for too long, because your slices are not 11x11cm as in the illustration. They are half as tall. You needed to either lower your temperature or shorten the duration of the bake.
The recipe is for 84% hydration whole rye dough with scald which is impossibly low, at least for my whole rye breads:
100g rye schrot&whole rye flour mix + 10g roasted bread crumbs + 3 g milled roasted malted grain = 113g dry "flour" base
95g water/113g flour = 84% hydration
My rye flours and schrot would need much more water, closer to 100% hydration, but how much exactly I would determine from experience, by touching the dough and by seeing how fast or how slow it flows if left alone on the table, since it's baked in tins.
Please, don't despair. This is not an easy loaf by any means. I mean it is not so difficult, but it requires more than one test bake to make it right with your ingredients and in your kitachen, because there are too many places where things could be going the wrong way.
Please, use this loaf, ground into crumbs in a food processor and sifted, keep them crumbs frozen, to feed your whole grain starter, just as you would use flour, and to add them to the future rye breads (up to 10% of all rye flour in the sourdough feed or bread formula could be substituted).
Thank you, mariana, for such a detailed response. Your comments are always welcome, but now I have more questions, if you don’t mind.
I think one of the problems with my attempt was the inability to approximate the mixing of the sourdough and scald. I suspect the longer mixing specified for these steps helps to break down the rye and form a gel. I couldn’t reproduce this by hand. I do have a Bosch Compact mixer now that might help with the mixing. I don’t know if the dough hook would mimic the mixing described by Dietmar.
I don’t know if the dough was underfermented without visual cues to look for in the bulk or proof stage. I also don’t have enough experience with these high-percentage rye doughs to judge the proper hydration level. I’m still trying to be better at that with wheat doughs.
I baked the loaf for 15 minutes at 230 °C with a steam pan, lowered the temperature to 190 °C, and continued baking for another 165 minutes without steam. From the comments on the recipe, it seems steam is applied throughout nearly the entire bake and many bakers lowered the temperature further during the bake. Despite the long baking, the bread was very moist, almost wet, inside. This was after waiting 24 hours before slicing.
The small size of the loaf is partially due to over-proofing. I noticed that the dough shrank during the early part of the bake. Could this also be because of the lack of gelation of the rye meal from insufficient mixing?
For the altus, I started with a rye bread that was medium color, but I did not toast the bread crumbs to a dark color. Should they be dark brown to nearly black? Also, would a chocolate rye malt (very dark brown, almost black) be more appropriate instead of the red rye malt? Or some combination?
I have already discarded this loaf. I tried eating some of it and let it age for a few days, hoping the flavor would improve, but I decided it wasn’t worth eating. Then it got moldy and away it went. I baked it last month but I just now decided to post on TFL. This recipe is still on my list to try again, but it is near the bottom of that list.
I thought with only a two-bar degree of difficulty I could manage. If you do bake this bread, I will be very interested in your experience.
I use hook and occasionally might use a spatula when I knead 100% rye in Bosch. Theoretically we could use the paddle, but I never use it for anything at all, so I just use the hook.
40min of mixing on 1st, or by hand, basically improves bread volume about 10-15%. It rubs the flour particles with water, which helps to hydrate them, and it introduces the air bubbles into the mass - the nuclei for the future pores/holes in the crumb.
Many people skip that step and get away with it. Hamelman mixes 100% rye on 1st only for 5 min and justifies it: no gluten development is necessary, so blend only to homogeneity. European rye bakers mix for 40min and research shows that it is beneficial for the bread volume. The dough feel also changes as you knead it longer, it becomes drier and less sticky which is understandable, as water gets absorbed into rye flour and rye schrot particles and some gluten forms.
I do not perceive rye as gel. Not chemically and not as a baker. Maybe chemically it's a gel, but I've never seen such descriptions in literature.
I have never seen rye bread shrinkage, so I do not know. I guess I never oveproofed my rye. My rye disasters are always due to underproofing, but if it's fully proofed, it just stays the same size for a long time both at room temperature and during baking. I really do not see how rye dough could collapse or shrink in the oven. It's a foam. A remarkably stable foam. It has no elastic gluten. Only gluten can collapse or shrink if overproofed or deteriorated.
I honestly do not understan his 4 hours of baking time, even if he baked 4-8 kg of rye dough in a small oven at once, he says he baled 4 large loaves each over 1kg in weight, still it's way too long for such a simple bread with well aerated crumb.
German pumpernickel is practically a paste without any pores and it is baked for a long time at very low temperature, but this bread is a foam, judging by its airy and open crumb, it heats through easily and should be ready quicker. Anyways, until I bake it myself, I would not know for sure, but I do not plan to keep a 1kg-2kg loaf in the oven for 4hrs at 190C. Ridiculous! This would give a very thick crust, and the photos show a very thin crust.
No burnt breadcrumbs please. They will make the bread taste bad. This man's crumb color is due to his choice of rye and his choice of malt. He used fermented red rye malt afaik. He said that he used this one
Thank you again, mariana, for another detailed post. I had looked at that rye malt that you linked to, but I had not read a translation of the description until your post. The powder that bon’gu is selling is not the usual rye malt that we might normally use. I didn’t realize it is actually Roggenaromastück (“brew piece”) made from diastatic rye malt that has been heated for 3 hours at 65 °C in a scald or mash and then dried. That’s different than rye that is malted and dried various temperatures to produce diastatic or non-diastatic rye malts. Unfortunately, I have never seen this Roggenaromastück for sale in North America. I also don’t know if it could be the missing element affecting bread color and possibly behavior in this dough.
You mentioned a paddle for the Bosch Compact mixer. Are you referring to the stirring attachment that has three wires? Or, is there another attachment, available separately? It would be nice to have something like a paddle for mixing sourdoughs or scalds.
I got the idea of rye forming a gel from The Rye Baker. Stanley Ginsberg discusses the differences between rye and wheat and mentions the arabinoxylans present in rye forming a viscous gel with water. I suppose that is similar to the behavior of gluten-free flours that contain xanthan or other gums. I do agree that rye doughs are essentially stable (mostly) foams. I wonder if my loaf was not a very stable foam that collapsed in the oven.
alcophile, I am thinking about using fermented red rye malt from Belarus, a gift from a baking friend here in Toronto. I just do not have any other. Of course, we could use dark malt syrup, barley or rye (liquid malt extract), or even fancy molasses, they would be perfect in that bread as well.
Yes the "paddle" is exactly that which is between the hook which is "one wire", lol, and the whisk with its "many wires". I use the whisk for liquid or soft gluten free concoctions like scalds.
I read about gel formation in rye dough after you mentioned it and found one German article where research shows how modern rye breads are challenging to produce due to the changing nature of rye grain and rye flours. They are losing baking quality from season to season, depending n weather, etc. and it is more challenging to bake good 100% rye bread with modern rye. Still I found no practical interest in discussing gels in rye dough based on that article. Maybe more research will be necessary. I am satisfied with or Canadian and US rye so far, they give me excellent 100% rye bread.
I read the original muckel recipe several times and your additional descriptions of your dough making and baking process and I think I found the most significant differences between your method and Dietmar's. It's temperature. His is significantly higher. Yours is at 21C and his is closer to 30C and above as it should be. For example, his article was published on June 5, 2020, and on June 4, 2020 it was 26C in Vienna, a warm summer day, with his kitchen for sure about 2-4C higer, at least.
There is also mass factor. His dough stays warm or gets warmer as it ferments because he made a bucket, about 9-10kg for four large loaves, each over 2 kg in weight, and you make about one kg of dough. His flour is warmer than yours and when mixed with warm water makes warmer dough, etc.etc.etc.
Basically, his sourdough starter, when fed 1:20, got ready for baking in 12-18 hrs at warm room temperarure , ready for acidifying and leavening bread dough and yours didn't, because yours was kept at 21C, at cool room temperature. He had more acid and more yeast in his Muckel, which is why it has those open pores, tall slices, and smooth side crusts.
Hit the problem on the head, Mariana! I was looking for a temp study after ready 21°C room temp. Because rye doughs are stiffer than wheat doughs in respect to temperature. Found something similar:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289321151_The_effect_of_some_technological_factors_on_the_rye_sourdough_bread
Thank you for the link to the article. I will have to remember that all room temperatures are not equal and to keep my rye doughs closer to 29–30 °C.
Frohe Weihnachten!
Thank you for pointing out the other deviation from the recipe. I will have to pay closer attention to dough temperatures for rye fermentation. That's another aspect of rye baking that I haven't mastered yet.
Have a Happy Holiday!
Recipe asks for the scald to be 100°C but recently we had an in-depth discussion of the benefits when a scald is 65°C.
If I interpret the description correctly, the recipe author actually expected his bread to be an inedible disaster, because he forgot it in the oven. So maybe it's not a surprise the bake conditions could use some adjustment? The comments visible in the German version of the page (Google translate can help here) also show that others have needed to reduce the baking time, temperature, or both, and have used steam for a long period throughout the baking process - moving closer towards a "pumpernickel" style of baking.
Just a couple thoughts on the other variables:
I am by no means expert here, but have read elsewhere that for pure "roggenschrot" breads, a long, slow kneading can help develop the binding powder of the fine fraction, to avoid crumbly texture in the final bread. A test for "readiness" is supposedly to squeeze a small (ping-pong-ball) sized dough ball between finger and thumb, and look for whether it deforms and rebounds smoothly (ready) or cracks (keep going). I've only baked this kind of bread a couple of times so don't have a body of experience to say how important this really is - but it sure was tedious to do by hand, a mixer would certainly be better!
On the rye malt: the dark rye malt called for in the recipe is inactive. Do you know whether the brewing malt you used was completely enzyme-inactive? If not, that could also lead to breakdown of the bread structure and gummy texture - genuinely curious for my own baking to know whether this is the case for light "crystal" or caramel brewing malt! If this is indeed a problem, a second roasting step for the malt should theoretically address this.
Is inactive. But good idea... I wonder if roasting it more could make it closer to the darker malt asked for in the recipe.
I tried to compare the red rye malt that I had ground with images at hobbybäcker.de. The color of the Fawcett's appeared similar to the Roggenmalz dunkel. What would have helped is a classification on a brewing color scale. Fawcett's crystal rye malt is 125–250° EBC and their roasted rye malt is 450–850° EBC. I have Weyermann chocolate rye malt (190–300° Lovibond; 500–800° EBC).
Weyermann also sells these malts to the food industry, so it may be the same the same as that sold at hobbybäcker.de. Maybe that was the malt I should have used, but the in the image it looked more brown than very dark brown. The ground chocolate rye malt is much darker than Dutch-process cocoa.
That might solve the color problem, but the rest of the bread characteristics are still a problem.
Not sure if you are aware, but if you view the page with the inbuilt translator, you don't see the comments of other bakers. Some of those comments may be relevant to your problem. To see them, select German as the language and translate in your browser, eg Chrome.
The other thought I have had is that if you make a scald a long way ahead and it is kept in a warm room, you can experience excessive enzymatic activity which can degrade the crumb. I have experienced this in the past.
Regarding the baking temperatures, my understanding is that the first temperature is used in the first part of the bake, with steam.
The steam is then vented after 15-20 mins and the bake temperature is lowered to the second figure.
Lance
Hi Lance. Thank you for the response. I did look at the comments (translated) and many commenters mentioned lower temperatures and shorter times. Most did use steam for nearly the entire bake. I tried it Dietmar's way.
The scald was stored at overnight ≤21 °C; it was mostly colder than that as I have an automatic setback thermostat. The bake regimen I used was what you suggested—15 minutes at 230 °C with steam and 165 minutes at 190 °C dry.
take a photo of the rye meal, if you have any left, and post it here. Rye meal may be lost in translation. Meal is open to interpretation. Is a grade of rye chops? Or is it coarse rye flour?
From the photo i'm thinking coarse rye flour.
Here is an image of the materials I have available for this recipe:
Clockwise from top: Weyermann Chocolate Rye Malt, Fawcett Crystal Rye Malt, Bay State Milling Medium Rye Meal
Here are a couple more images of the BSM rye meal:
I used the Fawcett crystal rye malt in the recipe. The Weyermann chocolate rye malt is much darker than the German Roggenmalz dunkel.
From colour alone Weyermann's Chocolate Rye Malt looks like the best thing for this bread. As for the Rye Meal I think it's one of those things which might be open to interpretation. Yours looks like a finer grade of rye chops and I don't think it'll produce the same crumb as in the recipe photo. I think when they say rye meal they mean coarse rye flour. Just my opinion as I don't think your rye meal producing the same bread. The rest will be down to timing and baking but I think if the rye meal is corrected you'll be part of the way there.
How about a quick pulse in a coffee grinder to get it a bit finer but not quite flour. Or swap some of it out for a dark rye flour. I do see some bigger bits in their photo but they still have a crumb structure which looks like it's produced from something closer to flour.
You're right about interpretation of grind. Here are some other images from online:
https://brotbackforum.iphpbb3.com/forum/77934371nx46130/backtreffen-und-backversuche-f34/10-online-backtreffen-2016-ostfriesisches-schwarzbrot-t6762.html (scroll down a bit)
https://schapfenmuehle.de/gewerbekunden/produkte/dunst-griess-kleie-schrot/roggenschrot-mittel
https://www.brotkruemel.com/schrote-und-flocken/131/roggenschrot-mittel-weich
Some look like rye chops and others are similar to Bay State Milling's.
The medium rye meal does have some flour component which is not fully captured in my image.
Approximate whatever was used in the recipe you're following. I'm thinking with variations like this no one is going to end up with the exact same crumb. You might have to experiment a bit. If yours is coming out a bit coarser than what was used in the recipe then less water will be needed. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what was off.
I love those back handed comments like: ...had it sitting around for a few days and it got mouldy.
That is a big indicator! A loaf like that should not mould. Not enough sour or drop in the pH is what I read. That would happen with a stronger, more powerful starter. Get the rye starter really revved up. When the dough was panned, did you happen to taste it? It should have some sourness to detect.
I'm also not to concerned with the other ingredients except for the scald. Make it a just before or an hour before using. I have played with different types of rye flours and still look back to that heavy coarse rye flour in Chile. Wonderful stuff! Rye bread tends to darken with age. I don't go out of my way to toast crumbled up altus but do tend to favour the crust when recycling. :) I have toasted a few rye slices in the toaster after removing the dark outer crust, just to see what more toasting would do but rarely bother these days.
I mix by hand. No electric mixer. I work with a sturdy spatula at first. Then with a bowl of water or stream of trickling water to moisten my hand or ev. hands when the dough in the bowl starts to get too sticky and bits tear off onto my hands but the dough is more like a stiff paste. I am a minimalist when it comes to kneading. As long as it is generally smooth and has a good feel to it, it is enough. I have noticed that my hands are better at mixing rye dough than my mixer with hooks, maybe it's the squishing action of my hands. (As a kid my mud pies looked pretty darn good! at least I thought so. Nice consistency.)
As with the others, I agree the bake was too long. Easy fix. This might be the only thing to change.
Rising and falling...could have had an air pocket pust up and fall. Docking might help here. The cracks look a lot like a rye loaf after hubby gets ahold of hot loaf and slices before it is cooled. Read you waited 24 hours. Must complement you on waiting! Wow, so hard to do! I tend to wrap up the loaf tightly after about 5 hrs. Cooling. The thicknes of the darker crust framing the crumb says it was baked too long. Time for moisture to work to the crust surface to soften would take days. Outside of cracks & dry crust, the crumb looks pretty good from what I can tell, not as compact as it could be. I might pile the paste higher in the middle down it's spine.
So when to stop baking? I would guess at about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours? Cover with foil tent with plenty of room to double if it wants to and to trap in steam the first hour of the bake. When done, makes a hollow sound when tapped.
When to bake? ... more info needed... coming full circle back to the starter... Did the dough rise at all after shaping? Temp?
I never said it got moldy after a few days. How was that a back-handed comment, anyway? It was more than TWO WEEKS before it started to show the first sign of mold. The crumb photo of the bread was taken 14 days(!) after it was baked; it was still unpleasantly gummy. I kept the loaf around hoping it would improve in flavor and/or the crust would soften and become edible; the crust never did soften.I only threw it out at that time.
The rye sour culture was refreshed before use and had a 2–3× rise during refresh. It seems to work just fine in other recipes, but I did not measure the pH of the rye meal sourdough.
I have difficulty with prolonged hand-mixing and kneading of heavy doughs because of a rotator cuff injury on my dominant arm. I guess I should forget about baking high-percentage rye breads.
I agree the bake seems too long, but why was the crumb so wet and gummy? Based on the crumb from a 180-minute bake, I don’t think the bread would have been edible if baked only 75–90 minutes. I am not alone in asking about the bake time. A comment for the recipe by R. Sandstedt 04.September 2020 at 05:40 asked Dietmar the same question. I tested the loaf like the commenter and my thermometer was also wet with the dough.
The dough did rise after shaping and the loaf had a dome shape. The proof was 110 minutes at 21 °C; I overshot by 20 minutes. It was not clear to me from the recipe how much rise was to be expected in the proof.
I admit that I am a novice rye baker, but I tried to follow this recipe to the best of my abilities with no substitutions of materials or avoidable deviations, except for the slight over-proof. I expected a much better, or at least edible, outcome. I would be interested to see another more experienced baker here on TFL attempt the recipe as written and post their results.
"I tried eating some of it and let it age for a few days, hoping the flavor would improve, but I decided it wasn’t worth eating. Then it got moldy and away it went."
A few weeks without mold cancels my thoughts on the pH.
The rye flour in the photo is very rough. I would call them chops too.