Since I’ve been using rye flour to make sourdough starter, now still in the feeding stage, I thought I’d try making a loaf of rye bread in my Panasonic bread maker just for the helluvit. Surprisingly, the rye recipe I used called for a lot less rye flour than ordinary white flour in the dough and while the result came out fine with impressive rise, it tastes pretty much like a nice loaf of ordinary white bread with no rye flavor whatsoever. Did I do something wrong or should I be using a sourdough rye recipe instead of just rye bread?
So not surprisingly it tasted less of rye and more of a white bread. This doesn’t sound like the rye sourdoughs I know and bake where they’re normally 100% rye or have a small % of white flour. To me a sourdough rye recipe should = a rye bread. Does your machine have a rye setting? Can it handle 100% (or a majority) rye flour?
All that aside I’m very impressed with the rise you’ve gotten. Come a long way from when you first started experimenting sourdough in your machine. In fact I think its the best you’ve gotten.
The recipe I used was for rye bread only, not sourdought rye, so I thought I’d get ordinary rye bread (couldn’t find any caraway seeds or other flavorers). But what I got was plain white bread without a hint of rye flavor. So obviously I need to use more rye flour in the next recipe I try, as opposed to rye starter for rye sourdough.
How much rye flour to white flour?
406 gr of white flour and only 15 gr of rye flour. In retrospect, I wonder how that could even be called a recipe for rye bread.
That is a total of 421g flour. I believe you can get away with…
380g white flour + 41g rye flour
without the need to change anything else. Perhaps it might need some more water which is more easily done by feel and therefore by hand but providing it wasn’t a low hydration dough in the first place it should be fine. See how it goes.
I’ll give it a shot after I eat all this white bread I’ve been making. Or I’ll try my hand at sourdough rye.
Abe, I realize the more rye flour one uses the denser the bread but I still wonder why a 380 white-41 rye ratio can be called rye bread. How about half and half?
You are right, Jen. At little over 10% rye it’s hardly enough to be called a rye bread. However it is enough for one to appreciate what rye can impart on the flavour of the bread without having to alter anything else. Once one starts going into higher percentages then one has to change other aspects of the recipe such as hydration, time and handling. One cannot just swap out 50% of the flour of a recipe for rye without the necessary adjustments and certainly not when doing so in a bread machine. So I thought as a stepping stone 10% would be a good start.
True rye bread is a totally different creature to wheat bread.