Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › Rye Bread (Make sponge as for wheat bread)
Rye Bread (Make sponge as for wheat bread)
Make sponge as for wheat bread, let rise over night, then mix it up with the rye flour (not so stiff as wheat bread), and bake.
A recipe written for someone who already bakes bread every week, so nearly everything is left out: quantities, salt, oven heat, time. Here is what has to be supplied.
- The sponge"As for wheat bread" means a loose batter of yeast, warm water or scalded milk, and enough white flour to make it the consistency of thick pancake batter, left to ferment overnight. Modern instant or active dry yeast works, but use very little for an overnight sponge — about 1/4 teaspoon per 3 cups of flour — or it will over-ferment and collapse by morning.
- SaltThe original assumes it, as the wheat bread recipes in the same book do. Reckon roughly 2 teaspoons of fine salt for a two-loaf batch, worked in when you mix in the rye.
- Rye behaves nothing like wheatThis is the hinge of the recipe, and the reason for the parenthesis "not so stiff as wheat bread." Rye has little gluten and a great deal of pentosan gum, so the dough stays slack and tacky no matter how long you work it. Resist adding flour to make it feel like wheat dough; you will get a brick.
- ProportionThe book gives none. A workable reading is a wheat sponge carrying about half the total flour, with rye making up the rest, a proportion often seen in nineteenth-century American "rye bread," though the books seldom specify. All-rye is possible but wants a sourdough method rather than this one.
- Kneading and risingTwo or three minutes of folding is enough; with half the flour rye there is little gluten window to develop. The second rise is shorter than for wheat, an hour or less, and rye is easy to over-proof — bake when the loaf has grown by about half, not doubled.
- OvenUnstated because the cook knew her stove. 425F for the first 15 minutes, dropped to 375F for another 30 to 40, suits a pan loaf. It is done at an internal temperature of about 200–205F.
- CoolingRye crumb sets slowly as the gums firm up. Cut it warm and it will seem gummy and underbaked. Leave the loaves at least four hours, preferably overnight.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) is associated with Ohio at a time when rye was still a common household grain in the northern states, cheaper than wheat and hardier in poor ground, and rye bread appears in many German and Scandinavian settler kitchens across the Midwest. The overnight sponge here is not a flourish but a standard American method of the period: a mild wheat ferment built at bedtime did the work that a commercial yeast packet does in an hour today, and the wheat portion also supplied the gluten structure that rye cannot provide on its own. Note that this is a lean, unsweetened, unspiced loaf — the caraway-and-molasses deli rye familiar now is usually credited to later Eastern European Jewish bakeries, though caraway rye was also a German tradition. The recipe's extreme brevity is itself the historical detail worth noticing: books of this kind were written for women who had made bread since girlhood and needed only the variation, not the lesson.