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Rye Bread
Follow directions given for entire wheat bread, using rye flour instead and adding carraway seeds if liked.
A cross-reference rather than a standalone formula: it sends you back to the entire wheat bread earlier in the section and asks you to swap the flour. That swap is not neutral, and rye behaves differently enough to be worth a few notes.
- The hinge: rye has no useful glutenRye contains gliadin but almost no glutenin, so it cannot build an elastic network the way wheat does. A loaf made with 100 percent rye on a wheat-bread schedule will be dense and sticky. Modern recipes commonly replace no more than a third to a half of the wheat flour with rye and keep the rest bread flour.
- Dough handlingRye dough is tacky from its pentosans, not from excess water, so resist the urge to flour it into submission. Wet hands or a bench scraper are better tools than more flour, and a shorter, gentler knead suits it.
- HydrationRye absorbs more water than wheat and absorbs it slowly. Expect to add liquid gradually and to let the dough rest 20 minutes before judging its consistency.
- "Entire wheat flour"The period term for whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ. Modern whole wheat flour is the direct equivalent; graham flour is close enough.
- Rye flour gradesThe book assumes one undifferentiated rye flour, roughly what is sold now as medium rye. Light or white rye gives a milder, paler loaf; dark or pumpernickel rye is coarser and will need still more wheat flour for structure.
- CarawayOne to two teaspoons per standard loaf is the usual range. Crushing or briefly toasting the seeds before mixing draws out more flavour than adding them whole.
- OvenThis entry specifies no oven; if the parent recipe calls for a moderate oven, that is usually read as about 350F, and a quick oven as roughly 400 to 425F. Some rye loaves are started hot for 10 to 15 minutes and finished at 375F. An internal temperature of about 200F is a more reliable test than the hollow tap.
- CoolingRye continues to set as it cools and slices badly warm. Give a loaf several hours, and a high-rye loaf a full day, before cutting.
Rye was the everyday bread grain across northern and eastern Europe long before it was a specialty item, valued because it tolerates cold, poor, acid soils that defeat wheat. In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rye tends to appear exactly as it does here, as a variation slipped in after the wheat loaves rather than a bread in its own right, which reflects both the dominance of wheat in the American diet and the flour's awkwardness in a straight yeast dough. The caraway is the tell: seeded rye is generally traced to central and eastern European baking traditions, and by the time this book was compiled it was familiar enough in American cities, through German and Jewish bakeries, that the book could offer it as an optional flourish without explanation. What the entry does not mention is sour rye, the long-fermented method that gives deli rye and pumpernickel their flavour and keeping quality; this is a plain sweet-yeast loaf with rye flour in it.