Old Milwaukee Rye Bread
This bread is pretty much straight out of Ginsberg's The Rye Baker. It uses a large rye sour (100% well aged rye levain). Counting the rye in the sour, rye makes up almost half the total flour. As in many ryes in the book, the sour provides acid to counteract starch attack and most of the rising ability comes from instant dry yeast. The recipe includes some butter and molasses. I did scale the loaf down to one loaf with 450g flour (not counting the rye sour)..
I baked this loaf because I was invited to (US) Thanksgiving dinner and I knew there would be a number of people of Jewish background who grew up in New York City back when there were still many neighborhood German and Jewish bakeries. Ginsberg writes that this bread was characteristic of Milwaukee bakeries, giving it a Germanic or Polish heritage, and not quite the same as a New York Jewish rye.
Except for needing a longer proofing time and not cracking on the top when it was ready to bake, and needing a longer bake time, the process followed the book's recipe closely. One difference is that since I was mixing by hand I gave the dough a rest after rough mixing, and did one S&F session later even though it's a yeasted dough.
Sure enough, the NYC old-timers said it was just like they remembered they used to get, and seemed very pleased.
The bread is very tasty, though not sour (to my surprise). It cuts easily without crumbling. No crumb shot because I wanted to present the loaf uncut for best effect. I will be making this again.
TomP
Great looking loaf, Tom. I'll check that recipe out.
I too made a rye for our T-day gathering. Decided to make it as rolls to minimize handling. With so many interesting dishes to choose from, the breads kinda took a back seat...
Yes, I made some rolls using dough for Japanese Milk bread (it uses a tangzhong). too. I made the rye the day before, and the rolls on the morning.
I remember baking this one when I was doing recipe testing for the book and it was a tasty one. Yours looks spot on. I made two kinds of rolls to bring to my family’s house for Thanksgiving and will post soon.
Best regards,
Ian
Thanks, Ian! You remind me of doing recipe testing for Peter Reinhart.
TomP
I would have loved to recipe test for him. It was a lot of fun for the Rye Baker but I couldn’t bake or eat rye for months afterwards 😆
The whole grains book, and Artisan Breads Everyday. Maybe I didn't test as meany recipes as you...
That must have been fun. I use the basic formula from Artisan Breads to develop most of my formulas with a bunch of my own modifications of course.
For the Rye Baker I think we each tested about half of the proposed formulas. I used to bring some of my test loaves to the dog park and share them with some of the other owners. Good times
It's funny but I hardly ever bake any actual recipes from either book. But as I went through the testing (and after), I streamlined and simplified my own standard process, based partly on what I learned from them. By now when I see a new recipe, I immediately think where and why it differs from my standard, and whether I want to bother trying out the changes. Just having different ingredients or add-ins usually doesn't count as being essentially different.
Rye can be a different beast, of course.
I very rarely cook recipes from books anymore. Baking is my creative outlet so I enjoy creating new formulas. I use my standard formulas to add different ingredients.
New baker here trying to produce an outstanding vollkornbrot an am about 30 loaves in.
This looks interesting. I am unable to find that recipe online -- could you share a link to it?
I have a very healthy rye starter that in December was producing a nice sour but I have lost that and not sure why or how to get it back. Why would the level of sour in my starter fade away?
I found a loaf described as having "aged rye bread" as part of the ingredients. Any idea how to incorporate that?
Thank you,
Sean
Here's a recipe, though I can't vouch for the results -
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/vollkornbrot-recipe
And here is a thread about this bread right here on TFL:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/3353/hamelmans-vollkornbrot-recipe
"aged rye bread" would be old or stale left-over bread. Many rye recipes suggest using some.
If by "This looks interesting." you mean this Old Milwaukee bread, I got it from The Rye Baker, the book by Stanlel Ginsberg (https://theryebaker.com).
TomP
hey Sean
my rye starter waxed and waned for months -- so that's kind-of normal.
It took me ages to come to understand it. I nearly killed it many times. Then I did kill it by dropping the jar & inundating it with tiny shards of glass (long after the fact, Mini Oven pointed out on this site that I could have saved it by running it through a very fine strainer.)
My suggestion to you: try different feeding ratios or schedules or hydration rates. I discovered my starter (reconstituted from a chunk that had sat untouched in the back of my fridge for four months) is happiest staying in the fridge for weeks at a time, as I dip into it once every ten days or so. When I've finally used up almost all of it, I'll feed it maybe 1:10:10 once or twice and then chuck it back in the cooler. It's been super-content & chill & consistent living like this for several years now.
Rob
Dumped almost all of the starter out, added in water and mixed until the bit of starter was fully dissolved. Then I knocked the jar over spilling all of the water out. All I had left was drops of water clinging to the jar. I added in more water and then the flour, mixed and waited. Within 12-24 hours we were back in business. So What mini said was a good idea. You don't even need the starter itself. Carefully straining it out to get rid of all the glass properly and even using drops of water that remain will be enough to save your starter. And to be extra careful once it has been fed and matured one can give it a few more good feeds using a small amount of starter each time. A bit overkill as it probably will get rid of all the glass the first time but can't harm being extra careful.