Tail of two 10% Rye Loaves

Weekends of Oct 16 & Oct 23

Published in

breadcalc.online blog

5 min readOct 25, 2020

Instead of looking for recipes online I decided to try my hand at making my own. In general a lot of rustic sourdoughs seem to start with a base of 1000g flour and are around 70–90% hydration, so somewhere between 700g and 900g water. They also seem to mostly come in at and 20g salt.

The amount of levain however seems to differ depending on fermentation time (which makes sense). Since I still have some Castle Valley Mill Whole Rye I wanted at least some rye in there. Here is the recipe I started with:

900g White flour (Bread or All Purpose)
100g Rye flour
750g H2O
200g Levain
20g Salt

The amount of levain I used was 200g because I wanted to follow a similar schedule as the 100% bolted whole wheat I made last week.

I ended up making this two weekends in a row. What I should have learned on last week’s dough being slightly under fermented was temperature here in PA has started to fall and my cool kitchen make the fermentation take WAY longer.

Levain

Both weeks I went with

100g all purpose flour
50g rye flour
150g of H2O
60g starter

The biggest different was first week I used 70 degree water, second week I used 85 degree water.

Both were mixed in the evening.

The second week we also just finished using the stove so there was an area that was 90 degrees that I let the levain sit for 30 min or so.

One other difference was the first week had a much cooler night and ambient temperature in my kitchen was 62 degrees overnight, second week ambient temperature was closer to 67 degrees overnight.

The amount of activity I had in the levain the first week was so disappointing I didn’t even take a picture of it.

Week two was active and ready to go by 9am

Recipes

Week 1: Same as above, used 900g bread flour
Week 2: Added 50g water, flour breakdown was 188g bread flour, 712g all purpose flour (I ran out of bread flour)

Autolyse

Week 1 — started at 9:45am, mixed together all of the flour with 700g of 74 degree water

Week 2 — started at 9:15am, mixed together all the flour with 750g of 90 degree water

Hard to tell from the photo, but the dough for the autolyse week one was pretty shaggy, week two was better.

Mix

Week 1 — started at 10:30am, final dough temperature 73 degrees

Week 2 — started at 10:00am, final dough temperature 77 degrees

I don’t recall the doughs being drastically different at this point. When I took the pictures I didn’t intend them to be compared side by side like this so angle is a bit different.

Bulk ferments

Week 1 —fermented for 9.5 hours with folds at 10:47am, 11:06am, and 11:27am

Week 2 —fermented for 8.75 hours with folds at 10:24am, 10:41am, 11:04am and 12:41pm

Whoa! What a difference. The second week had way more fermentation activity, even with being fermented 45 minutes less.

Shaping

Week 1 — Started the shaping around 8pm.

Week 2 — Started the shaping around 6:45pm.

Then I put them in proofing baskets in the refrigerator overnight. At this point I sort of knew in week number one that my dough felt under fermented. So I left that one out at room temperature for another hour before putting it in the refrigerator

Scoring and baking

Both weeks followed the same baking schedule. Preheated the oven to 500 degrees at 7am with cloches. At 8am put them in the oven, dropped the temperature to 745 degrees immediately, and baked with cover on for 30 min, cover off for 15 min.

The only difference was when I took them out of the refrigerator

Week 1 — took the dough out of the refrigerator at 6am (before preheating the oven — I was still afraid of under-fermenting)
Week 2 — took the dough out of the refrigerator at 7:45am

Shape wise there was definitely a better scoring & shaping going on week 1, however what the picture doesn’t show is how much tinier the loafs were. The scores in the second week weren’t as deep I think.