Rye Bread
The proper method with rye bread is the same as with French loaves, bat is, the dough is to be worked in layers and nothing added but salt to the yeast and water; the dough made up rather stiff to keep good shape, and when the loaves are put in the oven, instead of a long downward cut merely score the rye loaves across diagonally three or four times.
But for hotel use, where there is no brick oven, it does as well or better to make long loaves in pans as already directed for ordinary hotel bread.
This is a method note rather than a full formula — the book assumes you have already read its French bread and hotel bread entries, and it only tells you what changes for rye. A few things need filling in for a cook working from this page alone.
- No quantities are givenThe recipe is deliberately a variation: flour, water, yeast and salt in the proportions used for the book's French loaves. Nothing here specifies a hydration or a salt percentage, so treat it as a shaping-and-baking note attached to a dough you build from a modern formula.
- "Worked in layers"The book does not explain the phrase here; it points back to the French bread entry. It appears to mean the dough is folded and sheeted onto itself during shaping rather than simply rounded. In current terms, a series of folds during bulk fermentation and a tight layered roll-up at shaping would approximate it.
- Rye flour was rarely used aloneNineteenth-century American "rye bread" commonly meant a blend of rye and wheat rather than pure rye, though this entry does not say so. All-rye dough will not behave like the French loaf described here; rye proteins form little gluten, so it cannot be worked stiff and shaped the same way.
- "Rather stiff"A firm, low-hydration dough that holds its shape without a pan or basket; the text gives the reason itself, 'to keep good shape.' Rye also absorbs water differently from wheat and turns sticky and slack quickly.
- The diagonal scoringA long central slash lets a wheat loaf spring open; rye has weaker gas retention and a tender crumb, and the book substitutes three or four cuts across the loaf diagonally. The entry does not give a depth or angle for them.
- Brick oven versus pansA brick oven bakes with falling heat off a hot hearth; the book gives no temperatures. Without one, the book recommends pan loaves. For a modern equivalent, a hot oven with steam for the first ten minutes, then dropped to finish, is a reasonable approach.
- DonenessRye loaves sound hollow but read slightly wetter than wheat; an internal temperature of 200-205F is a more reliable check. Let them cool completely before cutting — rye crumb sets as it cools and slicing warm gives a gummy interior.
This entry comes from the working end of the trade, not the home kitchen: the American Pastry Cook was written for hotel and restaurant bakeshops. Rye bread in late nineteenth-century American cities was closely associated with German, Jewish and Central European immigrant bakers. The offhand line about hotels having no brick oven reflects a period in which hearth ovens were giving way to iron ovens and to pan-baked loaves, faster to load and easier to slice uniformly. Diagonal cuts across the top remain a common mark of a rye loaf.