(Sort of) Fleischmann's Rye Batter Bread

I made Fleischmann’s Rye Batter Bread a couple of years ago as I was easing back into bread baking. It was an easy recipe that produced a decent loaf of rye bread. I revisited this recipe a couple of months ago because a shoulder injury limited the amount hand mixing and kneading I could do.

I wanted to increase the level of rye in the formula (and use up some of my rye stock), so I modified the recipe to use a sourdough sponge of medium rye meal (Bay State Milling) and added Wingold Dark Rye flour (Bay State Milling) in the final dough. (Note: The dark rye flour is not whole rye flour, but a flour leftover after lighter grades have been removed by sifting. It has a higher ash content than whole rye and is equivalent to Austrian R2500 rye flour.)

Sponge:

The sponge matured for 17 hours at 23 °C.

The sponge was combined with the remaining dough ingredients and, after adding all the flour, mixed for 5–6 minutes at low speed with a new Bosch Compact mixer. I realized after the fact that I had read my calculations wrong and didn’t add as much water as planned (target: 88%; actual: 81%). A previous loaf at 88% hydration had a more open and moist crumb.

The dough was allowed to rest for 20 minutes, mixed on low speed for about a minute, and scraped into a 23×10×10 cm Pullman pan. The dough was allowed to proof for 50 minutes and was baked for 10 minutes at 220 °C then for 30 minutes at 190 °C. I forgot to take pictures of the dough before and after proofing (just getting used to this blog thing), but here is the final product:

The bread has a mild sour that makes it suitable for toast and sandwiches. The crumb is not the greatest as it’s just barely holding together at the top. I think more mixing and a longer bulk fermentation might help.