There are few things you should know abot rye bread. I used to buy it before on the days when I was just fed up with wheat flour bread and always liked it. What I didn’t know up until now is that if you buy rye bread at the supermarket or bakery and it is all soooo nice and soft and fluffy, covered with all sorts of seeds – well it just isn’t rye bread. What you are getting is bread made of 70% wheat flour coloured with 30% of rye flour. Bread made entirely of rye flour is wet and heavy because it is lacking gluten and cannot be fluffy. By heavy I mean that you could seriously hurt someone with it if you hit hard enough. The beauty of this bread is that it is very tasty and remains fresh literally for days. I usually eat it for at least 3 to 5 days and it remains nice in fresh, doesn’t dry or get all crumbly. It’s heavy texture means that you can have up to two slices of it during the meal and I say that as a huge pastry/bread lover. Rye flour is easy to work with unlike some other wholemeal flours – from my experience with various sorts of it, spelt flour comes first then rye one right after it. You can make this bread with just rye flour or combine it with other sorts of wholmeal flour – I will write a post about the one I made combinned with oat flour that turned out superb as well. One more thing – rye flour is highly affordable, unlike some other wholmeal flours, such as buckwheat one, it is really, really cheap and that’s another thing why I like using it for baking among all other good qualities and nutritive values this flour has.
I have to say I cheated with this recipe. I used baker’s yeast instead of baking powder and baking soda – according to the original recipe you put both in it. The reason I did it was that I just wasn’t in the mood for epic jurney to get a loaf of bread. I wrote somewhere before that for my body yeast is something it tolerates better than baking soda or baking powder so I found it fair enough to speed the things up and cheat with it. Generally speaking, when you are making a wholmeal bread with baking powder or soda, time is the key – the best thing to do is to make dough and leave it over night to get a full process of fermentation and only the next day add baking powder and/or soda and then bake it. I had no time or bread in the house to wait for that long.
To make this bread you will need the following ingredients:
- 500g of rye flour
- 500 ml of warm water
- 2 tsp of baker’s yeast
- 2 tbsp of pumpkin seed
- 2 tbsp of sesame
- 2 tbsp of sunflower seed
- 2 tbsp of ground flax seed
- 2 tbsp of olive oil
- 2 tsp of salt
- some of the seeds from above to top it with (optional)
Directions for preparation
- Take the bowl and put half the water and baker’s yeast then leave it someplace warm to start working and raise. If you want, you can add a tsp of brown sugar to speed it up because it’s the sugar that triggers the yeast to grow faster. Once the yeast is ready, add the remaining water, seeds and oil and mix it all well together. Basically, we have somewhat of a reverse process here by mixing the wet ingredints first instead of dry ones. In the end add rye flour and salt and mix it all well together. If you are working for the first time with rye flour like i did the dough you get will seem really weird. I thought at first that I had actually made some mistake because the dough was really sticky and just didn’t seem compact – it had a texture just like I actually mixed together mud and sand. Thats how weird it was. Anyway, do what I did next – cover it with some cloth and leave it some place warm until it doubles in size. It doesn’t take long and oh my God, does it increase in size – after I had removed the kitchen cloth there was so much dough I honestly thought I could feed the entire army with it.
- Put some flour on the working surface, take the dough out on it and work it with your hands only for a bit to get a nice compact mass and shape it the way you want it. Only at this stage you will realise that you had worried for nothing – it will be great to work with. Take the baking pot and put parchment paper in it and place the bread. While you are doing this, preheat the oven to 200°C/392°F. Once you got the bread in the pot, go generously over it with the wet hands to make it nicely wet and smooth. Then top it with seeds and press them lightly with your hands so they don’t fall off durnig baking.
- Put it in the oven. This bread should take about 30 minutes to be done depending on how strong your oven is. It will have a nice crust formed fairly quickly but make sure it doesn’t stay raw inside – after 20 minutes in the oven start proding it with the knife. Once you take the knife out and there is no dough on it, it means that the bread is ready to be taken out of the oven. Take it out and wrap it up in the kitchen cloth. Now, since rye bread has a wet texture the best thing to do would be to leave it wrapped until it cools down completely. Otherwise, once you cut it, the knife will make it look sticky and raw even though it isn’t. Once it has cooled down unwrap it and enjoy this delicious bread!
Bonne appetite! 
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