Math for blending a medium rye flour
I'd like to try out "Hans Joakim's" rye recipe that is on this site [1] which calls for a medium rye flour, which I do not have.
My problem is that I have a plain bag of some flour simply called "sifted rye flour", it comes from a farmer who only delivers in brown bags without any writing so no idea of the extraction rate he managed to achieve in the sifting. I'd like to blend this with some wholemeal rye flour to make the medium rye flour.
Guess I have to make some sort of rough estimation to do this blending. I see that Stan Ginsberg was in a discussion on this site in 2018 [2] where he said that medium rye is about 85% XR. Now, thumb suck, assuming my "sifted" rye is say 60% XR [3], I'm guessing that if I were to blend say 62.5g of rye wholemeal with 37.5g of the sifted rye I should come up with something like a medium rye flour? To keep things simple I'll probably go with 60 WM:40 sifted. Does this sound like a good enough guess?
[1] https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13552/hansjoakim039s-favorite-70-sourdough-rye
[2] https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57887/how-do-you-get-medium-rye-flour-out-homemilled-whole-rye
[3] https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/33265/white-rye-extraction-rate
Thanks and sorry for bending anyone's head with math!
-Jon
I recently made Hans Joakim's 70% rye using whole rye flour and it was superb.
Indeed, having baked a bunch of high %age ryes where the recipes call for medium and I've subbed in whole, I've stopped worrying about the difference.
Rob
Can you ask the farmer about the extraction rate?
If it's something close to light/white rye, it'll affect it's properties quite a lot, much lower enzymatic activity and mineral content. But it might be just about medium rye anyway, depend on how it's sifted.
Indeed, whole and medium rye mostly can be interchanged with minimal issues, but I think light/white rye is quite different. Does your flour look white, like AP flour? Or darker?
What you do is you take the flour you have and bake with it, and see what happens.