disappointing oven spring for sourdough rye

this is my first 'real' sourdough rye.....in that it uses a true sourdough, not ingredients such as yogart and cider vinegar to simulate the acidity of a sourdough. the oven spring is pathetic. so disappointing! i used the rye formuala of peter reinhart's sourdough starter, and refreshed about 7 hours prior to using the sourdough in a recipe; the starter seemed active enough....i mean i just had finished with it a day or so ago and then went ahead and refreshed anyway.....but i don't have experience with real sourdoughs.. i did the recipe in local breads for dark silesian rye. the one thing i did was where he specified unbleached bread flour, preferably high gluten; i did about 1/2 ka whole wheat bread flour and 1/2 first clear flour. was this a mistake? perhaps so. i baked in a cloche; oven preheated for 1 hours at 425 and when i put the bread in the oven and covered with the cloche, i immediately lowered the temperature to 400 and baked for 50 minutes. last ten minutes i uncovered the cloche.....this was my first bread risen in my baskets from sfbi and i liked pattern i got ......but i so wished they rose as high as when i did the laurel's kitchen recipe. the bread smells great and it is so hard to wait to cut into them.......they were also difficult to slash and didn't seem to have the structure to take the slashing very well. they just seemed so soft....not overproofed as i only let them proof for one hour max. it seemed like the dough didn't have enough substance to it....like the sourcorn rye of laurel's kitchen. it seemed like the dough might have been too wet....if that is possible.

i had my dough VERY wet, as everything i've read says that wet dough is the way to go for rye. it was a MESS to knead but i didn't add a drop of flour....i kneaded about 15 minutes by hand, and towards the end i think the bread got a tiny bit less messy but it still was very wet. i floured it well and could barely shape the loafs,,,i just threw them into the batton baskets. i thought these are going to be some really moist great loafs....it's just they are sooo flat. any tips?

i can list the entire recipe if that would help....

on a side note, the hammelman book arrived this evening! i am so pysched! can't wait to read his chapter on ryes!

sourdough rye

sourdough rye

here's a pix of the crumb:

i'm actually pleased w/ the open crumbness of it....i've never gotten all those little holes before.....laurel's corn rye is very fine grained....the taste is actually very good, pleasantly sour, but not too much; nice complexity to the taste as well. i suppose it wasn't such a complete failure after all....

sourdough crumb

I made Leader's Silesian Dark Rye once about a year ago. I also found it did not spring as much as expected. See my report at: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4510/leaders-silesian-dark-rye Your using WW flour would make the dough rise even less, but this may be how this bread is suppose to come out also. One other thought is that your gluten development may not have been sufficient. Maybe some one else has made this bread and can offer other experience.
David

Today I just baked two rye boule's in my LaCloche. I used Eric's favorite rye recipe with only a few small changes. My dough was very wet and barely rounded up. I decided to preheat my LaCloche and oven at 500F...I also had it set at convection heating. I slashed a cross on top and took my loaf that was rising in a large low bowl ontop of parchment and dropped it onto the LaCloche bottom and covered it with the bell top. Turned the heat down to 475F. When I took my lid off 20min. later I had a big round beautiful ball and some nice looking "wings". It had blossomed into such a nice round pretty loaf....I'm sure the extra temperature made the difference...when I cut it open I had a really nice very holey crumb...a little more so than yours...so maybe my dough was even wetter than yours. Try turning up the heat. It did make a difference for me. Sorry, I can't post pictures and probably will remain totally frustrated about it....I feel about posting photos the way you feel about your baking today...better luck next try.

Sylvia

when i look at eric's fav rye recipe there's alot of first clear flour and there is also conventional yeast in it. the recipe i used had no conventional yeast and a much higher percentage of whole grain rye and wheat flours. david i read your blog on developing a rye starter and i think i did not refresh mine enough.....i see you went through a 3 step cycle, whereas i only refreshed in one step. i am starting step one this evening and will go through the entire process as you describe it. the laurel's kitchen sourcorn recipe that i had so much sucess with also had conventional yeast in it......i have to remember that as well.

thanks for the suggestions......i look forward to baking lots more ryes!

deborah

Hi, Deborah. I think the procedure for refreshing rye sour I wrote about is the one from Greenstein. This has been failsafe for me, especially if my sour has not been refreshed for a couple weeks or more. It also is a way of building up the quantity of sour. This is important if the bread you are making uses a large quantity, like Jewish Sour Rye. For Leader's rye breads, I usually just build the "rye sourdough" as he suggests in one build. If you have a new rye sour, doing the 3-stage building will invigorate it, and increase the likelihood of success. BTW, I actually like the Polish Cottage Rye in "Local Breads" more than the Silesian Dark Rye. The Silesian Light Rye is excellent, too, but it is a very light rye and maybe not what you are after.
David

the recipe needs more flour and no slashing to be successful. What is the rye to wheat ratio?

Mini O

here's the recipe (ingredients)

white rye sourdough stage

50 gms rye sourdough (refreshed 7 hours prior; this was a new sourdough that had gone through a week or so process per peter reinhart's sourdough establishment instructions)

75 gms water

75 gms white rye flour (i used first clear flour as i don't have white rye)

bread dough

200 gms white rye sourdough as above

350 gms water

350 gms unbleached bread flour (i used 1/2 ww bread blour and 1/2 first clear flour)

150 gms whole rye flour (he says to use fine ground, but i used stone ground which is quite coarse...hodgeson mills)

2 tb caraway seeds

10 gms salt

so it's looking like there is 200 gms whole rye (starter plus whole grain rye) to 500 nonrye (first clear + whole wheat flour) i don't have a calculator handy but that's less than 50% rye maybe 40% rye?

deborah

This is a video clip of Richard Bertinet that may help you understand gluten development, if that's your problem. IMHO for a rye bread that has the amount of rye in it that your recipe has, you need to really do a maximum stretch of the gluten in the unbleached bread flour to form strands that will suppport the rye, as it contains little or no gluten. Anyway, here's a video that may be of help. Mr. Bertinet is working with sweet, enriched dough but the same principle applies to any dough.

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/video/2008/03/bertinet_sweetdough

Good luck,

Howard

425g wheat to 175g rye ...when translated means ...you need to develop the wheat gluten to it's maximun potential through folding-rest-folding-rest... until it tightens up. Treat this more like a wheat bread. You may be proofing longer, I think the first loaf was underproofed.

If you want the rye to be as stretchy as it can be, then try to get most of it into the beginning sour or ferment. Substituting the 70g rye with clear flour wasn't good for the rye, it would have been better to use the darker rye than wheat in this case.

G-luck with the next loaf,

Mini O