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.