Browse Tag
Sourdough
Halme Bakery’s Ring Rye/Ruisreikäleipä (Finland)
| Rye %: | 91% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 17-21 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 30-40 minutes |
| Yield: | Two 1¼ lb/575 gram loaves + two 2¾ oz/50g rolls |
During the 2019 Rye Tour to Finland and Latvia, our guide in Helsinki, sourdough baker and author Eliisa Kuusela, arranged a visit – actually two (of which more in a bit) – to Leipomo Halme, a 120 year-old bakery in Espoo, about 30 minutes northwest of central Helsinki.
Palanga Rye/Ruginė Duona iš Palangos (Lithuania)
| Rye %: | 90% |
| Stages: | Sourdough sponge, Scald, Scald-sponge (Opara), Yeast sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 24-30 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 45-50 minutes |
| Yield: | One 3¼ lb/1.46 kg loaf |
My weakness for Baltic rye breads took over when I found this recipe in a Polish blog. Just to set the scene, Palanga is a coastal resort in western Lithuania, on the shores of the Baltic whose white sand beaches attract tourists from all over Europe, especially Poles and Germans. I suspect that this bread, which is lighter in both color and flavor that the other Baltic ryes I’ve encountered, is intended to appeal to the tastes of the town’s economically important summer visitors. Instead of the wholegrain rye flour that’s commonly used in Baltic breads, this one uses Type 1150, a much lighter blend that can be approximated by mixing 2/3 medium rye and 1/3 white rye.
Guest Post: Why Am I Marketing Baltic Rye Bread?
by John Melngailis – Partner, Black Rooster Food, LLC
NOTE: I first met John Melngailis at Bread Furst, James Beard winner Mark Furstenburg’s Washington DC bakery. Mark had been kind enough to arrange for me to appear at the bakery to publicize The Rye Baker, and invited John, whose love of his native Latvian rye breads prompted him to found Black Rooster Food and start baking them commercially. Needless to say, John and I hit it off immediately, spending a good part of the morning talking about the marvels of Baltic rye. He was also kind enough to bring me a loaf of each of his breads — dense, sweet-sour rupjmaize, and a triangular loaf of his fruit-and-nut holiday bread, both of which were extraordinary. So when John sent me this essay on his relationship with the bread he loves, I simply had to share; it’s a fascinating read.
Vitebsk Rye/Vitebskiy Chleb (Belarus)
| Rye %: | 100% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Scald, Scald-sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture |
| Start to Finish: | 11 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 40-50 minutes |
| Yield: | One 2¼ lb/1.0 kg loaf |
I’d been meaning to make Vitebsk Rye for some time – ever since I found it in Mike Zhuravel’s magnificent Russian-language bread blog, O Khlebye. The result made me wonder why I’d waited so long: this is a truly splendid Belarusian rye bread.
A Coast-to-Coast South Tyrolean (Merano) Rye/Meraner Striezl
| Rye %: | 61% |
| Stages: | 2-stage rye sponge, Wheat sponge, Soaker, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture |
| Start to Finish: | 26-30 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 45-60 minutes |
| Yield: | Two 28 oz/800 g loaves |
If there’s a rye bread equivalent of the Perfect Storm – that is, when all the ideal conditions come together at the same time – this bread is it. Start with the formula for a classic South Tyrolean Merano Rye from Austrian master baker/blogger Dietmar Kappl, then use it to showcase two spectacular artisan flours – California-grown Abruzzi rye from Grist & Toll and organic heritage emmer from Maine Grains – and you come up with a bread that’s very, very special.
8-Hour Quick Sponge Deli Rye
| Rye %: | 40% |
| Stages: | 2-Stage quick sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 7-8 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 30-40 minutes |
| Yield: | Two 1½ lb/700 g loaves |
Deli rye – that light, open-crumbed, caraway-fragrant New York classic – is what most Americans think of when they hear “rye bread.” Without getting into the rightness or wrongness of that fact, deli rye is without question the bread to wrap around a thick layer of pastrami, corned beef or pickled tongue – with or without Swiss cheese, cole slaw, sauerkraut, mustard and/or Russian dressing. So when my wife went shopping one morning and came back with a package of heavily peppered, deep pink pastrami, there was no question about how we were going to eat it.
Oldenburg Rye/Oldenburger Landbrot (Germany)
| Rye %: | 100% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Soaker, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 22-28 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 30-40 minutes |
| Yield: | One 3 lb./1.36 kg loaf |
For a bread that many Germans consider to be a best of breed Lower Saxony rye, recipes for Oldenburg Rye are surprisingly scarce; in fact, it took me several months, plus the help of a German baking friend, to locate this recipe on the website of a large north German baking ingredients company.
The search was worth the hassle: this is a bread that combines the robust flavors and mouth-feel of coarse rye meal with the moist crumb of a stale-bread soaker and the intense sour of an 18-24 hour sponge.
Muscovite Rye/Podmoskovny Rye (Russia)
| Rye %: | 69% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 9-10 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 30-35 minutes |
| Yield: | One 1 ½ lb/700g loaf |
I recently was able to get hold of a couple of kilos of Russian rye flour, and so what better bread to try it out on than a Russian rye bread that specifically calls for this type of flour? The recipe comes from O Khlebe, the Russian-language blog that’s my go-to source for all breads Russian. Its name comes from its origin, Podmoskva, the region surrounding Moscow — so a northern bread with the lighter color and milder flavor associated with Russia’s largest and most cosmopolitan urban center.
Ketex’s Crusty Boule/Bauernkruste (Germany)
| Rye %: | 89% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Soaker, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 18-20 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 30-40 minutes |
| Yield: | One 2½ lb/1.2 kg loaf |
I found this flavorful, crusty rye bread in one of the first German baking books I acquired, Rustikale Brote aus deutschen Landen (Rustic Breads from the German Countryside) by Gerhard Kellner, a well-known German bread blogger who goes by the nickname “Ketex.” It intrigued me for a couple of reasons.