I can never seem to get the hang of rye breads. No matter what I do, the dough always seems to end up sticky and sludgy with little to no gluten development. I like a good dense rye every now and again, but I wish I could get the hang of making lighter rye breads. The example photos for this bread show nice little bubbles in the crumb. It looks dense, but not brick-like. Mine came out as a brick.

I think, what I probably need, is to have someone who is very comfortable working with rye to show me how to work it and what to do. Either that, or to try turning it over to a good stand mixer with a dough hook and see if that produces any better results than my hand kneading.

In the meantime, here's a rye bread recipe. Maybe you'll have better luck with it than I did.

100% Rye Sourdough

Slightly adapted from The Fresh Loaf

Ingredients

• 400g (wholemeal) rye flour¹
• 300g water
• 200g ripe/active sourdough starter (100% hydration)
• 100g rye berries², cooked
• 40g honey
• 10g salt

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients and mix well. Cover and rest for 30 minutes.
2. Knead for 20-30 minutes.³
3. Cover and rest for ~12 hours.
4. Grease a 20cm by 10cm (8"x4") loaf pan.
5. Turn dough out onto a well-floured surface, press flat, letterfold, roll up, and place, seam-side-down, in prepared pan.
6. Gently wet the surface (preferably by spritzing with a spray bottle), cover, and proof at room temperature for 3-6 hours.
7. Preheat oven to 230°C (450°F) and boil some water.
8. Pour a few cups of boiling water into a large pan and place it on the bottom rack of the oven.
9. Bake the bread on the middle rack (over the pan of boiling water) for 20 minutes.
10. Remove pan of boiling water and reduce oven temperature to 200°C (400°F). Cover bread with foil and bake for another 20 minutes.
11. Remove bread from pan and turn off oven.
12. Place bread on middle rack in hot (but turned off) oven for another 10 minutes.
13. Remove from oven brush all over with either butter or sunflower oil.
14. Transfer to wire rack to cool.
15. Wrap bread in a tea towel and rest at room temperature for 24 hours.
16. Place wrapped loaf in a plastic bag and chill in the fridge overnight.
17. Slice with a sharp, non-serrated knife. Store in the fridge.

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¹ I can be difficult to find rye flour that hasn't been sifted or otherwise processed to remove bran or other bits of the grain. Also, rye flour has a fairly short shelf life. I generally find it easiest to just get rye berries and grind my own flour as needed. That said, it might be interesting to try this with commercial rye flour sometime and see how that affects the final results. ^Back
2 I used up all of my rye berries to make the flour for this recipe, so I opted to cook 100g of hard wheat berries instead. I just boiled them in a bit of water until they seemed molto al dente, then drained them and let them cool a bit before adding them to the dough. ^Back
3 The original recipe suggests that the gluten should be "well-develped" by this point. It was most definitely not behaving like dough with well-developed gluten for me. Maybe this means that I should've kept kneading it, but I was tired and the dough was really not well-behaved and I found it very difficult to handle so, after 30 minutes, I gave up and just left it to its own devices. ^Back