BBA Challenge #35: Sunflower Seed Rye

Oof.

Sometimes I think I'm running out of steam since my baking has basically halted. Part of the reason is that I want to catch up. That is- synchronize what I've baked with what I've posted in order to not forget what the breads were like.

It now seems that by the time I get to the actual post, I've completely forgotten what the bread looked like, or even tasted like. Such is the case with this one. Though I remember the bread being good- slightly dense, chewy on the outside with that slight rye taste, and just a wee bit dry, even. Though I don't remember much else.

I do think that this bread, for me at least, was not really that special since sunflower seeds are used in almost all German Breads. You can buy rolls with them, and even loaves of bread, the seeds themselves baked onto the top crust, and the crumb itself full of the yummy seeds. Whereas this one, yes, it had seeds, but it was not the chock-a-block seed-fest of Sonnenblumenkernkastenbrot (Sunflower-seed loaf bread) that you normally get here.

It's funny that this bread concludes the Sourdough chapter in the Bread Baker's Apprentice. It's another one of those with yeast in it to help the bread rise faster. I would have thought there would be a wider variety in the survey of bread that is the book, but I believe that Peter Reinhart didn't want to overwhelm any beginning bakers, some of whom would probably have had no sourdough experience to begin with.

Still, having had years of normal yeasted-bread experience under my belt, and only a few months of sourdough experience, I have to say that the Sourdough section was quite tame. Yes, you have to wait for the bread to rise on its own. Yes, sometimes you have yeast to help it along. Yes, it's like regular bread, but, really, I didn't find any real surprises, aside from the sheer enormity of the Poilâne-style Miche.

So, without further ado. Into the frying pan...


Actually, a cast-iron pan. The recipe begins with toasting sunflower seeds to unlock their flavors and aromas.


The mise en place reveals a starter (upper left) and a soaker (left). I have to admit that I actually didn't use coarse whole-rye, again, since I was hoping my whole rye flour would be coarse on its own. The specialty flour store where I get my flour has coarse-ground whole wheat flour, so I was actually expecting the whole rye to follow suit, but, alas, it was not to be.


All ingredients take a whirl in the stand mixer...


And come out in a firm blob of strengthened proteins, networked gluten, and sunflower seeds taut within the mixture. This particular dough looks like a pillow because of the stretch and folds I did during the rise.


After the first rise, the dough is shaped into a boule.


And then poked.


And prodded into a ring. The only thing about it is that the opening of the ring really should be that huge. In a fit of doubt that seizes me every now and then, I decided that the hole was way too big, and then padded back inwards.


Normally, one would use dowels to separate the sections, but I reached for the first thing that struck me, the handle of a wooden spoon. Twice for each line- pressing it down a total of eight times for four clear impressions.


So, imagine my disappointment at the risen product. The lines were pretty clearly defined, but the hole in the center had almost completely closed.


Still, I can't deny the memory of the bread being simply delicious when I ate a full third of it (as soon as it cooled, of course) with various cheeses and mustards. Now, if I could remember just how it tasted...

Other Sunflower Seed Rye bakers:

Janice from Round The Table

Abby from Stir it! Scrape it! Mix it! Bake it!

Anne Marie from Rosemary and Garlic

BBA Challenge #32: Sourdough-100% Sourdough Rye Bread

Rye. Again.

I thought this was the sourdough section.

I think I'd taken my bias against rye a bit too far. I mean, I see a fair number of okay rye loaves here in Germany, since everyone seems to eat it it like it was- well, like it was wheat. The thing is that rye has this tanginess that I tend not to like. The reason?

When I first moved here I had a limited vocabulary. I had the grammar pretty much down, though the verb at the end of the sentence still sometimes confuses me. I hadn't yet mastered interactions with people in bakeries though that would change really fast as soon as I discovered the Streuselschnecken and Kirschplunder. Thus, I would just buy everything I needed at the grocery store, including the bread for the week, and be done with it.

I bought the biggest loaf of bread I could find, which coincidentally, also happened to be the cheapest. For 0,59€ I could get a kilo and a half of rye bread that was a huge oval, but now, thinking back to it, it very much looked like it was baked by a machine. Every morning I would make myself two slices of bread with quark and Pflaumenmus and sit down with my German language textbook. Perhaps it was the novelty of the bread, so cheap and so big.

Eventually, however, life changed. I learned new words, and eventually started working with my limited German language abilities. I started buying Kürbiskernbrot, which is pumpkin seed bread, and left the rye behind. I learned to dislike it, with its agressively dry and tangy taste. Though I had seen all-rye loaves in almost every bakery, I shunned them. They were not for me, those dense creatures that looked like they could take a tooth off in all their chewiness. A colleague once bought one for the office, but I dared not take a slice.

So you can see how unenthusiastic I was about this particular bread in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge. For this bread, my approach was to just get it over with. I would make it, photograph is, then unceremoniously toss it because I knew, even before I had started, that it would not work out.


The first step was finding coarse-ground whole rye flour. Since my local flour store has coarse-ground whole wheat flour, I thought their rye flour would be the same. But no. Because it was so-called normal whole rye, I decided to leave it at that. I didn't want to keep buying whole rye flour and end up with ten kilos of unusable flour. In addition to the whole-rye flour, I also had some left over from the Marbled Rye as well, so I decided to keep it at that.


Just like with wheat flour, rye flour also has numbers that correlate directly to the amount of ash in the flour. Well, the amount of ash, in milligrams, left over when burning 100g of flour. In this case, Type 997 flour is the white variety of rye flours. The odd thing is that you can find this type of white flour in any normal supermarket in Germany. Well, not the discounters, but you can find it anywhere you can find Type 550 wheat flour.


So this bread required not only a firm starter (top left), but also a soaker of the whole rye flour (top right). I think this step was a bit unnecessary because the flour wasn't coarse, but as I said, I was just sort of half-present for this bread, so I just went ahead and did it.


Because rye contains a lower amount of gluten, and that gluten is quite delicate, it is quite easy to overmix it, or generally mess it up. I have to constantly remind myself that rye is not wheat.


The dough came into a ball quite quickly.


And then I decided it was done. I didn't even bother with a windowpane.


The dough barely rose, which is a bit odd, since rye is supposed to be super nutritious for the yeasty beasts and bacterias that live in sourdough. I ended up deciding it was too late to bake the bread, and just put the whole thing in a single loaf pan and stuck it in the fridge. It was about 2/3 full, and I thought it wouldn't rise further.


Holy moley! It rose. The next morning, I went to check on it, and it had crested the loaf pan. Not by much, but it had actually risen! Because I had to go to work, I just put it back in the fridge until that night, worried that it would overrise and collapse by the time I got back.

You might not believe it, but I still didn't have that much faith in the bread. I just put it into the heated oven without bothering to slash it. Remember, I was thinking- bake, photograph and trash.


The oven spring was moderate, but there was actually some. The bread did some splitting apart, as you can see on the top.

I didn't expect to like this bread. Up until the moment I sliced into it, I thought I'd be justified in disliking it. Yeah, it's just Rye bread. I thought I would take a bite and say HA! I told you so, and toss the bread into the garbage.

But. No.

It was not meant to be. I was pleasantly surprised.

I keep thinking to myself- Imagine if you actually put some effort into this bread.

Maybe it would have been even better, but I can just go down the street to the bakery and get a reliable loaf of whole rye bread, whereas I can't get a loaf of Poilâne Bread. Well, I have to take the subway for that, but you'll have to wait until the next post for that story!

Other 100% Bakers include:

Janice from Round the Table

Sally from Bewitching Kitchen

Cindy from Salt and Serenity

Anne Marie from Rosemary and Garlic

The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge is hosted by Nicole from Pinch My Salt. Check out her BBA Breads!

BBA Challenge #31: New York Deli Rye

Rye and I have never been best of friends. I never really ate rye bread during my time in the States. It simply wasn't available. When it was, it was laden with those tricky caraway seeds that were just too strong tasting and smelling. For me, rye bread was simply bread with caraway seeds.

I never gave much thought to the actual rye part of the bread because for me, the two were inseparable. However, when I moved to Germany, I would pick up kilo-and-a-half loaves of rye bread for just under one Euro. The thing is, I ate so much of this bread that I ended up hating rye bread.

When I got back into baking, I was fiercely anti-rye. It was all-wheat all-the-time for me. I would ask bakeries what percentage of rye was in the bread. If they couldn't tell me, I would just move on. I even had a mini-argument about sourdough with someone at one of my favorite bakeries. They claimed that you need rye for sourdough. I stood by my anti-rye stance.

I think that if I hadn't taken part in this challenge, I would never have given rye a second chance. I dragged my feet through the Marbled Rye Bread, and the bread ended up surprising me. Amy even liked the cakey crumb. She said it reminded her of her grandmother's breads. I also dragged my feet through all the rye breads in the sourdough chapter, and ended up on the other side really liking rye. I'm not going to put it in every recipe, but I will definitely and discreetly add some to my future doughs.

The first step was rather puzzling. You sauté onions for a bit and then add them to the sourdough starter. I did this late at night and left the sourdough on the counter until the next day.


Normally I have a much neater mise en place, but sometimes there is so much going on that I can't clear off half the counter to get a good shot. Or, in this case, I couldn't be bothered to find the other lens to take the shot. Well, actually, both.


The dough is mixed gently and left to rise. This winter, I've been putting the breads on the dining table, which is in the living room, one of the two rooms to receive heat during the winter. I would love to heat the kitchen, but there's no door on the frame, and the heat would just dissipate into our very long hallway.


The dough rose nicely, and the bits of onion were still very visible. I don't know if the rye bread in New York also had onions in it. I don't think I ever had a slice of rye when I lived there. I didn't visit any real delis. All the ones I did visit just offered very packed cheese sandwiches in soft baguettes for two bucks.


I decided to use my quarter sheet pans to do free-form loaves.


I should have noted that the dough was quite delicate. It was slack and structureless.


Unfortunately, the dough rose outward instead of upward. Plus surface tension was just not there. My blade just kept dragging, so the cuts came out far from perfect.


The final product, however, was intensely aromatic, and the crust came out mottled. Perhaps some of the onions were too heavy and collapsed in the rather slack dough. The final loaves were only about 4cm high.


Two quarter-sheet pans don't fit in my tiny oven. Which means that a half-sheet pan would be completely useless to me. As it was, I had to stack one edge of one pan over the other one, resulting in a malformed loaf that looked like a wedge more than a bread. That's the second loaf, above. Also, this bread would have been awesome in a loaf pan. Which would make sense since a New York Deli Rye would be used to make sandwiches.

What I loved about this one was that it was another of those just-sneak-another-slice breads. I meant to take a crumb shot, but I was just too busy noshing on this one. The onions were sweet and very much complemented the rye. This is definitely one that I think I'll make again, but next time, it will be snuggled securely between the walls of the loaf pans.

Though I am behind in reading and posting- I still want to give a shout out to my favorite New York Deli Bakers:

Sally from Bewitching Kitchen

Paul from Yumarama

Anne Marie from Rosemary and Garlic

Mags at The Other Side of Fifty

BBA Challenge #19: Marbled Rye Bread

So, I've actually been baking bread for about 12 years now. My first loaf was in high school. Imagine that! I was not even 18 and already baking bread. Unfortunately, that loaf didn't come out at all. In fact, it didn't even rise, as I had no idea what I was doing, and the yeast I used was more than two years expired.

Still, I soldered on, and by the time sophomore year of college rolled around, I baked again. I don't remember how where I learned to make bread. There was no bread book that I discovered all dusty and tucked away in a remote corner of the library. I think I just sort of remembered that high school loaf and just dug my hands in to water and flour again, determined not to fail.

My bread baking had actually dropped off in the last few years. Since coming to Germany, I think I had perhaps baked two or three times, and despite having eating a lot of rye bread, I didn't really think that much about bread. In part, it was because the bakery across the street is so amazing, so I could just pick up a Landbrot whenever I wanted. Plus, on almost every street in this city there is a bakery. On the street where I work, there are three, the last one having just opened about six months ago. Not all bakeries are good, but most halfway decent ones will have a great selection of mostly dark bread.

The thing is, though, that when you have a baking culture that is fairly reliant on rye, you sort of start to get sick of it. In every good bakery, I ask what percent of the flour used is rye. Most of the time they answer without thinking, but at Soluna Brot und Öl on Gneisenaustrasse they got all uppity, particularly when I corrected their comment that sourdough can only be made with rye flour. Maybe in the Deutsches Brotfachbuch or something. They do, however, make the absolute best bread in Berlin (aside from yours truly, of course), so I will forgive them. Maybe it's that charming German service I've been hearing about.

So, it is with heavy feet that I dragged myself to the nineteenth loaf in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge.


The bread consists of two loaves. Rather, it consists of making two loaves that are exactly the same except for coloring. Hold on. It consists of making two batches that are the same except for coloring, then rolling them together into two separate loaves with a swirl. Got that?

I don't drink coffee. At university I tried getting into it, honest I did. But it didn't work out. Coffee and me- we don't mix. I have often said that I have an iron stomach, but this iron stomach just does not like the acidity of coffee. It makes me double over. In addition to that, I don't drink any caffeine. Yup, you heard me. I don't need caffeine. When I wake up in the morning, I have trouble getting out of the warmth of the bed, but once I'm awake, I can't go back to sleep.

While the recipe suggested coffee as a colorant, I didn't have any on hand. I did, however have the can of joy pictured above.


At various points in Germany's history, coffee was scarce. Not all the time, just at certain points. During wartime and during the time of the DDR, people had to improvise. What resulted, is a small market for Malzkaffee- coffee made out of roasted barley. In recent history, however, they added malted barley and chicory for flavor.

So that's what I drink every now and again. Though Malzkaffee is popular amongst the elderly, younger people tend to snub their noses at this coffee ersatz. For me, however, it is a warm yummy drink as well as the colorant to my bread.


The mise en place was the same things, but doubled. I doubled my use of bowls because I didn't want to re weigh everything and half it when it came time to do the bread. The only difference is the bowl on the upper left with the Malzkaffee.


Two batches were made in the exact same manner. Peter Reinhart warns here about overkneading the rye and making it gummy. Because I've never actually baked with rye, I freaked out and didn't really knead it for more than four minutes. I theoretically could have thrown it all out and started again. After all, rye flour is super easy to get here. I got a bag at the grocery store near work. Next to the spelt flour.


I have to apologize for the relative lack of beautiful photos, as we were also preparing a Mexican feast for a guest at the same time I was making the bread. Mexican Feast post will have to wait until we do it again, as it was too hectic to take photos. Which means the rye bread got short shrift.


The loaves came out squished. There wasn't that much rise, and virtually no oven spring.


Also, the dark part of the rye wasn't very dark, even though I added about a half cup of the "coffee".


And! I also got a hole in the top of my crust. Usually this is a sign of overproofing, but in my case, probably not. These are the two loaves cut, by the way, as we made our way from one to the other. Just in case you were wondering why the swirls didn't match up.

I have to say that I was very underwhelmed with the flavor and texture. It was just. Well, dense and oddly flavored.

And. But.

Something changed in the course of the week.

I ate slices every day for a week, thinking it was unfair that I had to eat it, and trying to think of someone, anyone, who would take the bread. On maybe Wednesday I bit into it. Toasted. And was amazed. I don't know it it is a flavor thing or even a decomposition thing, but the bread tasted way better. Maybe I just had to adjust my taste buds. Or maybe it was the Poiret fruit spread.

Other Rye Bakers who haven't lost their Marbled are:

Deb at Italian Food Forever

Paul at Yumarama

Sally at Bewitching Kitchen

Janice at Round The Table

Cindy at Salt and Serenity

This post is part of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge. Thanks again to Nicole from Pinch My Salt for the challenge.