Baking Fresh Black Rye Bread

Bread is a little more involved than most of the other things I bake or cook. Mostly I just throw things together in the pan and it turns out fairly well. But not bread. It needs to follow a specific recipe, because if it’s too wet, the dough may not rise. If it’s too dry, you end up with a mouthful of flour and a loaf that doesn’t hold together. Everything is mixed together in precise measurements to form a really delicious bread after baking. So here’s my recipe for a dark rye bread that’s a favorite for Sunday brunch panini.

. 1 ½ cups water

• 2 tablespoons cider vinegar

• 2 ½ cups bread flour

• 1 cup rye flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 2 tablespoons margarine

• 2 tablespoons dark corn syrup

• 1 tablespoon brown sugar

• 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

• 1 tablespoon caraway seed

• ¼ teaspoon fennel seed (Optional)

• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast
  

Basic rye bread ingredients

For this particular bread, I’m using store bought ingredients.

Secondary ingredients

Everything is put in the mixing bowl of the Kitchen Aid mixer. This thing is a great time saver for mixing and making almost everything in the kitchen.

In the mixer

I turn it on the lowest setting and let it do it’s magic for about 10 minutes.

Dough ball

The resulting dough ball should just be barely sticky, and roll out of the dough bowl in one whole piece. If it’s crumbly, add just a teaspoon of water until it makes a single ball. I roll my dough ball on the board with just a sprinkling of flour to make the outside of it drier.

Rolling out the dough

The ball is placed in a greased pan and put inside my Brod and Taylor bread proofer. This is set at 95* F or so for about an hour and a half until the dough rises. Keep in mind that rye bread is very dense and it takes some extra time for the yeast to do it’s work.

Proofer to let dough rise

Why would I need something as fancy as a bread proofer, when I can just do it the old fashioned way of covering the bread with a tea towel while it warms up and rises on its own ? Well… I live in Maine. It does get kind of toasty in summer sometimes but keep something in mind if you please. It’s late July right now… basically the height of summer, you know ? And where I live the temperature got down into the low to mid 50’s Fahrenheit last night. So yeah — there’s that. Cold weather is great for old fat guys like me, but not so great for things that like it warmer — like yeast for example.

Proofer controls

Once the dough has risen about as far as it will go, I bake the bread in an oven set at 400* F for 35 minutes. After the timer beeps and lets me know the bread has baked long enough and I take it out of the oven and give it a thump with my finger to check if it’s done. If baked through, the bread will have a hollow thumping sound, if not — it goes back in the pan and a few more minutes in the oven.

Baked rye loaf

Once the bread cools for an hour on the wire rack, I’ll slice it up for brunch paninis. Rye black bread is incredibly dense and heavy. It is normal made in a small Pullman pan, but in sandwich sizes it makes a very filling meal that will power you through the day.