Hamelman's 40 Percent Caraway Rye

Hamelman's 40 Percent Caraway Rye (Pictures at the bottom)

A few weeks ago I bought a bag of Medium Rye flour. Some friends had been touting a local deli's "Rye Bread". This bread was, to my taste, baked with a whiff of light rye flour and an excess of caraway seeds, but I took it as a challenge. Most of the time when I bake rye bread I use relatively coarse, stoneground, organic whole rye flour, but the deli's rye called for a compromise.  I remembered Mike Avery's positive remarks about medium rye on his website, so I bought some from King Arthur.

A couple of days ago, having just run out of some home-baked rye, I decided it was time to put my new flour to work. But which recipe to use? I have Daniel Leader's Local Breads, and considered modifying either the Dark Silesian, or Pierre Nury's recipes to fit my medium rye, but an offhand note by Jeffrey Hamelman in his recipe for 40 Percent Caraway Rye, to the effect that the bread would work well with medium rye flour, sold me on this recipe.

The name is a little misleading, as the 40% refers to the percentage of rye flour, all of which is prefermented in the final levain build. (The recipe's a hybrid, using both sourdough and commercial yeast.) Accordingly this gives the bread a slightly acidic profile, which is fine with my wife and me.

I modified the recipe just a bit, besides using the medium rye flour. I decreased the size of the batch, which is easy to do with Hamelman and his baker's percentages. I halved the percentage of caraway seeds, because I thought this would help bring out the flavor of the flour. I also used only half the recipe's percentage of commercial yeast, which allowed me to let the bulk fermentation go for 3 hours instead of just one, and finally I retarded the dough after 45 minutes of proofing, because I had to leave the house for a couple of hours. All these changes worked out well, fortunately.

I was quite surprised at how much easier it was to work with the dough using medium rye in place of whole rye. The dough felt and reacted much more like a wheat dough. This emboldened me to fold it a couple of times during the bulk fermentation, and this in turn gave the bread a significant rise, great oven spring, and a more open crumb than I'm used to with rye bread. Thumbs up! For the record, I baked the bread using a steam pan on the bottom rack, and a turkey roasting pan lid as a cover for 15 minutes of the bake (after loading and spritzing a couple of times and letting the dough sit uncovered on the baking stone for the first three minutes).

I was also surprised by the taste. It's fabulous! And full of rye flavor, as well. I'm glad I cut back on the caraway seeds, because their flavor is still fully present. If I had had my druthers, dinner would have been rye bread on rye bread, period.

I highly recommend this recipe, and I have nothing but compliments for King Arthur on this flour (which isn't something I can say about all their flours).

Now we have to invite our friends back to see how my rye stacks up to the local deli's!

Here's the loaf:

The crumb looks like this:

David