Aug 10: 100% Rye w/ Pumpkin & Oat Kamut Rolls encore

I'm mostly down to one crutch or a cane, and moving around better, so thought that it would be a good week to re-stock the freezer with my husband's favourite (the oat kamut rolls from http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/52425/catching-myself-oat-kamut-rolls-july-7), and a variation on my own favourite, which is 100% rye.

I was focusing on my own treat, so got lazy and duplicated the last bake on the rolls almost exactly.  The only change that I made was being TOO lazy and leaving a baking steel in the oven below the rolls, which actually made them take longer and not bake through as well since I had them in a pyrex dish.  For next time, I really need to remember to bake them at a higher temp (should go at least 375 if not 425), and to make sure to not block the heat from the element with a steel!

Still, they are tasty, and he enjoyed them for sandwiches on the weekend:

As for the rye, well - I still had some pumpkin puree around, and I kept seeing this on the sidebar here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35940/pumpkin-sourdough-rye-bbd-62

I wanted a 100% rye, had some 2-week-old rye sour hanging out in the fridge, had the pumpkin puree, so it just felt like a good time to try my version of this one. 

It SHOULD have been quite straight-forward, but I made the mistake of reading a post on one of the older starter threads where an "expert" stated that an older refrigerated sour wouldn't be strong enough to raise a loaf without mostly being discarded and refreshed with a good feed.  Well, I didn't feel like discarding any, and just had a "what would happen if..." mood, so I took the sour that I had, and just added a part of the flour and water from my planned recipe as a "feed", and left it to sit for a couple of hours to see whether it would do anything.

Well.  What it did was to grow like crazy, so obviously it would have been more than capable of raising the loaf directly from the fridge!  Instead, I ended up taking that now massive levain, mixing up the dough, and had it just keep going at top speed:

Mixed old levain / sour from fridge with 100 deg F water and dark rye flour at 9:45 a.m.  Covered and placed in oven with door open and light on for 30 minutes, then door closed and no light.  It doubled in volume in 2-1/2 hours.

Mixed up the final paste including levain, salt, malt, pumpkin puree, dark rye flour, and water at 12:45 p.m.  This is extremely wet (definitely more paste than dough), so basically just stirred with dampened heavy spatula in bowl.  Covered and let sit on the counter (room temp about 74 deg F).

Dough had almost doubled by 1:45 p.m., so moved it in to a heavily buttered bread tin, then bagged it and let it sit on the counter at room temp.

By 2:25 p.m., dough had just crested top of tin.  No surface bubbles, but just had the feeling it was time to bake, so fully docked it, smoothed the top with a wet spatula, and put it in a covered dark roasted in a cold oven set at 425 deg F for 25 minutes, then uncovered, rotated, and finished the bake at 400 deg F for 70 minutes, to internal temperature of 202 deg F.

By the end of the bake, it was obvious that I had over-fermented it at least a bit, but it didn't feel overly heavy or wet, so I let it cool uncovered on the rack for 8 hours, then put it in a plastic bag and let it sit until Saturday (about 40 hours total).

The side shows that it collapsed a bit instead of springing in the oven, and the top clearly shows the grey from the water not evaporating quickly enough due to me choosing a cold oven instead of preheating:

Fortunately, the flavour and the crumb still came out wonderfully:

This is a strongly flavoured bread that I adore, and will do again, but without the old sour experiment and with a pre-heated oven and higher bake temps.  It's not a taste that my husband enjoys, so all the more for me ;)