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Rye Bread SPONGE
1 pint luke warm water 2 pints sifted rye flour 1 compressed yeast cake Dissolve yeast in the water then add the flour making it the consistency of a batter. Allow to rise until it is inclined to settle.
This is only the first stage of a rye loaf — a wet yeast sponge that is later built into a dough with more flour, salt and usually some wheat flour. Read it as a preferment, not a bread.
- Compressed yeast cakeA standard cake was about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast, equivalent to one packet of active dry yeast, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons. Instant yeast works as well; use the same amount and stir it straight into the flour if you prefer.
- Measures1 pint of water is 2 cups (475 ml). 2 pints of sifted rye flour is 4 cups, which for rye is roughly 14–16 oz / 400–460 g depending on how lightly it is spooned in. Weigh it if you can; sifted rye packs very unevenly.
- "Luke warm"Blood-warm, somewhere in the region of 90-105F: warm enough to wake the yeast, not hot enough to harm it. Rye ferments briskly, so a cooler kitchen is an advantage rather than a problem.
- The hinge: "inclined to settle"The sponge rises, domes, and then begins to sink back. That falling point is when it goes into the dough - earlier and it has less flavour, later and it turns slack and sharply sour. Timing depends on the warmth of the room and the liveliness of the yeast; watch it rather than the clock.
- ConsistencyAt a pint of water to two pints of flour this is a genuinely loose, wet batter rather than a dough. Rye batters are sticky and look slacker than a wheat sponge; do not correct it with extra flour.
- What comes nextThe sponge would be built into a dough with salt, more flour and often a flavouring such as caraway. Straight rye gives a dense, close crumb, and many period American rye recipes call for a good part wheat flour alongside it.
- Stirring, not kneadingRye has little gluten to develop, so beat the sponge well with a spoon to aerate it and leave it alone. Kneading a rye sponge accomplishes nothing except a coated bowl.
Sponge-and-dough baking was the standard household method through the nineteenth century, a holdover from the days when leaven was slow and uncertain: a loose batter of flour, water and yeast was set to work first, then strengthened into a dough once the ferment was visibly lively. Compressed fresh yeast, which this recipe assumes, is generally traced in American use to the 1870s and made the sponge stage optional — but bakers kept it because it produced better flavour and a more reliable rise, particularly with rye, which lacks the gluten to tolerate a fast, hard ferment. Rye itself was grown and baked in America from the colonial period, in forms such as rye-and-Indian bread, long before it appeared in a Gold Medal Flour promotional cookbook.