Yeast-Leavened Rye Bread

Rye bread ready for some jam.

We’ve been wanting to reduce the amount of wheat in our diet. Actually, we would like to eliminate it for a while and see how that goes, but we also like bread. Enter Rye Flour.

I’ve been having pretty decent results making bread so far, but before I embarked on my rye loaf I did some research. I remember my Grade 8 Home Economics teacher telling us that the gluten in the wheat is really important when making a dough, and I was worried because I had only ever heard of gluten being in wheat. In my research I found that there is gluten in rye, but it’s different and doesn’t develop the same way, and tends to break down because of something else in the flour. The way to get around this is to make sourdough rye, which rises at a lower PH value, (is more acidic), and the thing that breaks down the gluten doesn’t like the acidity so it doesn’t work. However, I wanted bread right away and didn’t have any sourdough starter on hand. I had seen several mentions of using commercial yeast but adding some vinegar or lemon juice, and eventually found a recipe for a bread that did just that, so that’s what I based my rye loaf on.

Basically, I made the same no-knead bread as I usually do but used rye flour instead of whole wheat, and added a tablespoon of cider vinegar, (why cider? the recipe I had found was for a cider bread), and let it rise longer in the pan. I don’t know if the vinegar did anything, but the bread came out just fine and as you can see from the picture is almost all gone.

A couple of other things I learned: You can’t knead rye bread even if you want to. The gluten just doesn’t develop the same way as with wheat. Rye dough is just a big sticky mass. Also, it seems that rye bread, perhaps because of its density, is better cold than fresh out of the oven. Fresh out of the oven the center of the loaf was a sticky, gooey, mass, but when the loaf cooled it had a uniform texture.

So, what now? The bread is almost gone, I might make another loaf. In the meantime, I have started making some 100% rye sourdough starter to try out.

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  • What is Choices That Matter?

    I'm a guy named John, and I do most of the writing around here. I went from a really active lifestyle to a really inactive lifestyle very quickly and my body is noticing. On top of that I'm worried about what's happening to our planet, so, I'm trying to do something about it.

    For Christmas I received the book Food Matters, which I found very interesting and inspired me to start changing. Check out my first post for the beginning of the story.