Finally a formula: sprouted rye

My usual starter lives on the counter top and is fed every morning a 1:2:2:4 ratio of starter, bread flour, whole wheat flour and water. The temperature in the kitchen is a stubborn 66-70F in the daytime and dips quite a bit at night so the starter lives on one feed a day for most of the week with 2 feeds per day in the run up to bake day. I've been managing my starter like this for about a year (with additional feeding in hot weather), it leavens bread just fine so I've had no reason to complain.

Just for fun, I took a few days to gradually convert a bit of this starter into a rye starter (as I'd read somewhere here that wheat starter can need time to adjust to being fed rye flour). After a single feeding this appeared to have been way too pessimistic. The starter loves eating wholemeal rye! Seriously, it was climbing out of the bowl trying to find more… The starter fed with rye was making its wheat cousin look slow and cumbersome by bubbling ferociously after 4 hours. This has lead me to wonder whether it would a good idea to keep a rye starter instead of wheat.

1. (Day 1) Mix leaven ingredients with 25g rye starter and leave at room temperature for approx 12 hours.
2. (Day 2) Mix all flours and water, cover and leave for a 40 minute autolyse.
3. Add 300g of rye leaven and mix well until combined, leave for 30 minutes.
4. Add salt and fold the dough until combined and leave for 30 minutes.
5. Add remaining ingredients and fold into dough. Fold the dough 2-4 times every 30 minutes for an additional 2 hours.
6. Total bulk fermentation should be about 4.5 hours at 68-70F.
7. Shape the dough gently into boules and retard in the fridge.
8. After 4 hours the loaves were ready to bake as the dough was expanding out of the banettons!
9. Bake in preheated dutch oven, 20 minutes covered at 250C, 10 minutes covered at 200C and 20minutes uncovered at 200C.

These loaves darkened a lot more quickly than usual once the lid of the dutch oven was removed due to the added honey. Perhaps next time I would consider reducing the oven temperature a little further.

This bread is a bit like a posh version of mighty white a bread I was obsessed with as a child (in my opinion that's a good thing!). I've also been baking some oat porridge bread but the results are acceptable but not great so far. Some of the results are documented here: http://jennybakesbread.blogspot.com/2016/03/scoring-experiments-whole-oat-porridge.html Happy Baking!