I’ve been on a bread making binge lately, the cold weather was conducive to hanging out inside and running the oven. I got 5 lb bags of hard red wheat and rye berries, and ground those into flour using the same superfine feed rate setting. Based on the last results, I decided to use double the salt (counters the bland taste) and then let each type rise twice before the punchdown and final rise. Here’s the loaves:
Wheat
YES!!! I finally got the desired rise, it was perfect and didn’t collapse. I used small loaf pans, that may help (they are about 1/2 size in all dimensions, and dark for best browning). You can see the nice light structure, it made a big difference to get the second rise and slow down the process. I originally thought one rise for the whole grains, but that seems to lead to the top collapsing. On to the rye…
Rye
I milled my own flour versus using stale, coarse rye from the store. The store flour seems to be used to make “rye-taste” bread, with lots of white flour for the rise. It doesn’t work at all for bread IMO. This rye dough was pretty thin at first, it’s too sticky for a bread machine unless you had something that was round and a rubber paddle to pick up all the dough. And there’s be no point in kneading it extensively as there’s no gluten. I used the same mini pans, lots of water and salt, with two risings. The rises took over 3 hours (total time), but it was worth the wait.
They rose picture-perfect, then sagged a bit in the oven (grrrrr). But, as you can see from the interior it has a nice shaggy texture and not too dense. A couple of notes on the 100% rye:
- The interior is gummy when first baked. You want to let the loaves cool and sit a day before eating it, it’s good but needs that time to develop the texture. I’ve seen references to this elsewhere, seems odd but that’s the rye I suppose.
- The flavor is stronger than wheat, not bad but you probably have to like Rye Krisp to enjoy it. It mellows with time, I bag my bread in the fridge and that seems to work well to develop the taste. I make toast in the mornings with my experiments, and have been savoring the rye, more so than the wheat.
The flour is on the left, it looks EXACTLY like thermite incendiary powder (it’s a very weird pink color). I used whole wheat pancake recipe as a basis, and they turned out perfect. The flour gives everything an unusual nutty flavor, it’s not bad just takes getting used to. In fact, it was sort of compelling and we ate all them all up. Here’s the bread I made with the leftover flour, and with the same 100% wheat process (lots of water):
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