Sourdough NY Deli Rye Bread

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Your recipe is classic, I make it and family and friends can’t believe it’s a home made product. I add 3 tablespoons of dried onion flakes, not onion powder or granulated onion but store bought dried onion flakes to the dough. The bread is a NY Style Caraway Onion Rye Bread. The onion is a background subtle flavor addition. Stu Borken, Minneapolis, Mn.

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Excellent bake and recipe Melissa, who doesn’t like a NY deli rye right? I’ve made a very similar loaf several times that I love. I’m not a huge fan of caraway seeds so will use poppy seeds on the crust which I prefer. A variation where you add rehydrated onions to the dough and use the water from the hydration of the onions is also a really delicious variation.
The version that I’ve made is about 30% whole rye so similar to yours. All the rye is in the levain and I develop the dough to good gluten development before the rye levain is added. This seems to help with the structure of the dough. However, your version totally works and turns out a gorgeous tall loaf.

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This recipe looks good. This one on the King Arthur site is also good, and quite simple to make, though it appears complicated at first glance. Jewish Rye Bread Recipe | King Arthur Baking

And…important! A “classic” New York Jewish rye has some caraway seeds but it also has tiny black seeds–I’m not sure what a Jewish baker calls them, but they’re black cumin, or Nigella seeds, often available in the Indian section of grocery stores. For me (I grew up in New Jersey on Pechter’s Rye, baked in Newark, in enormous rounds and cut into sections for grocery stores), those little black seeds are just as important as the caraway.

Melissa, your loaf of deli style rye bread looks really really good! And, as usual, you make everything look so easy in a video. :slight_smile:

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Melissa: your recipe indicates " If your dough is warm like mine, you may want to refrigerate immediately; and if it is cold, you may want to refrigerate the basket after closer to 1 hour.". What dough temperature do you consider to be warm? Thanks.

I’m giving this suggestion 5 thumbs up. :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: Add dried onion to various breads, not just rye.

Benny, you are not alone. Recently saw ‘dill rye’ in the grocery store. Flipped the package over and compared ingredients with other deli style rye breads – apparently, just substitute dill seeds for the caraway seeds. It actually sound kind of good.

Rye Dill

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Interesting Otis, I’ll have to look for dill seeds I’ve never seen them in any store but I have to admit I may just have overlooked them since I’d never seen a use for them until now.

I happen to like Caraway Seeds and associate them with Rye but Nigella Seeds might make an interesting substitute.

The recipe looks really good. I bake exclusively with whole grain flour that I mill myself, so I wish that there was a fresh milled flour option instead of being forced to use nutrient-dead bread flour.

Swap bread flour for whole-wheat flour and adjust hydration as necessary.

I haven’t tried this recipe yet but in my quest for the ultimate rye bread recipe I intend to next weekend. One question, if my math is correct (not my strong suit) this is a 78% hydration. Is that correct?

Right now my go to recipe for Jewish rye is from KA by Barb Alpern. It uses a bit of instant yeast instead of all sourdough and more rye flour. It comes in at about 68% hydration (my math) so I’m just wondering about the amount of H2O in this recipe.

Dough

*Assuming your starter is 100% hydration

Total Water: 395g + 50g from the starter = 445g
Total Flour: 360g + 170g + 50g from the starter = 580g
Hydration: 445 / 580 x 100 = 76.7%

However there is a bit of barley malt or honey so it’ll feel a little higher than that.

@challahman @Benito @Otis @Betsy @Abe You’ve all convinced me to try either or both onion flakes or nigella seeds (which have onion flavor notes) in my next bake of this bread.

@rhoward132 My dough was in the low 80sF because I used the Raisenne heating pad. Deciding when to refrigerate it is a calculation (guesstimation really, based on experience that always has room for growth) of how far the dough expanded in the bucket, how webby the dough feels, and the temperature, because hot doughs take longer to cool down in the refrigerator.

@Jerry306 The dough is pretty manageable, which you can see in the first video. When you’re hand-kneading the dough after the ~15 minute rest, you do add some flour via sprinkling on the dough and bench. Maybe a total of 1-2 Tbsp, which is 7-14 g. Best to go by feel though as flours differ across harvest and farm.

@sweetjennigirl56 As @Abe noted, you can substitute a whole grain flour and adjust the hydration. If you choose yecora rojo, bolles, hard white spring wheat, or hard red spring wheat, you’ll be closest to approximating the chewiness of the classic deli rye bread.

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Your bread turned out as good as I was expecting. Can’t wait to have it with my Montreal smoked meat tonight! A simple question. Do you score your dough before or after you brush on the white egg?

By the way, since I did not have a dough riser, I used a heating pad and put it on the low setting and by the end of the fourth or fifth hour, the dough had risen nicely and was just above 80°.

That looks great and I’m jealous of your Montreal smoked meat even though I haven’t googled it yet lol

I scored after the egg wash because I was worried that egg in the score opening would seal the bursting prematurely – but the style does have minimum oven spring so maybe sealing would be good too.

Edit: Yum the meat looks delicious. This fermented mustard would be awesome with it.
Tip from @mcw.mark that I followed is to make more brine than the recipe recommends.
Also you can inoculate it with 1/2 tsp of sourdough starter to get the lacto fermentation going.

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So simple and delicious! Thanks for a great recipe.

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How much more?

Thanks for the link to the mustard! :slight_smile:

1.5 x the water and salt. Here are my pics of the project

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYT-VyEL772/?igshid=MDM4ZDc5MmU=