Taming the Unruly Weed

Making progress in the mysterious rye bread world... and life.

A Norman cider rye, ready for slicing.

It’s been a year now, and I finally feel like I’ve started to understand the mysteries of rye bread. I know to many of you this might seem trivial or irrelevant, but for me this journey has represented both an embrace of my new, Midwestern environment — as well as a willingness to learn something hard, something I’ll fail at constantly.

I’ve long lost track of the number of loaves I’ve baked, but it’s north of 60. I’ve made 100 percent ryes, down to a 25 percent rye, which felt like a “why bother” because it lacked both rye flavor and wheat’s lift, so meh.

Through trial and error, the sweet spot for me seems to be about 55 percent rye, more or less. This level of rye gives you enough of its character, while still allowing you to make a pretty loaf in a banneton, like all those wheat sourdough bakers who got good during the Pandemic.

Here are some of the trials I’ve faced learning this grain.

• Rye is sticky. Really sticky. In high percentages, it’s not kneadable.

• The gluten in rye is far weaker than in wheat. That limits what you can do with it, and high percentage ryes all need to be baked in a loaf pan or they won’t get any lift at all.

• Rye contains an enzyme that will attack its starches even under baking temperatures, which creates a thing called “starch attack” which can collapse your loaf. You need the dough to be legitimately acidic to avoid this.

• A rye loaf must be cool before you slice it, or the interior will be wet and gummy. This is especially true with high percentage ryes. A few 100 percent ryes are not to be sliced for a full 24 hours after baking. Plus side? Rye bread doesn’t go stale nearly as fast as wheat. I’ve had loaves keep a week on the counter.

• Good rye flour is hard to find! I’ve settled on my local Sunrise Mills and Janie’s Mill in Illinois as my mail order source of rye products. If you want to be a rye baker, you need to go mail order because dark rye is the only available rye in supermarkets. I never use dark rye unless I am going for a black bread.

• It’s actually quite easy to skip store-bought yeast and make 100 percent sourdough ryes. You just need a hefty overnight sponge, which is a mix of flour, water and starter that sits overnight, letting the wee yeasties multiply exponentially. I still often add a gram or two of commercial yeast, just for insurance. I might stop doing that.

A loaf of rye ciabatta, cooling.

Why rye? Because it’s an intrinsic part of the Midwest. The peoples who immigrated here, and the climate, are perfect for rye. There are old school ryes dotted all over the region, from Jewish and Polish ryes in cities from Cleveland to St Paul, and Nordic ryes in places like Grand Forks, Duluth and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. German ryes dominate in Milwaukee.

It’s also a classic case of Hank zigging where others zag. I’ve done this my whole life: I’d rather be good at something a little esoteric than just OK at some larger skill. Not too many people bake rye breads, so it was a natural.

And, well, I like rye bread. With all these loaves, I’ve started eating bread fried in butter, topped with my homemade jams and jellies for breakfast each morning. (I’m still working on mastering jellies, as I wrote about here.)

A slice of rye with some of the fawncy tinned fish I can’t stop myself from buying makes a superior lunch, as does simple rye and cheese. Rye, cheese and thinly sliced cured meats, like smoked mutton from Ingebretsen’s in Minneapolis, is amazing.

I’ve continued to break bread with others as I’ve been on this journey, as I wrote about when I began it. A loaf of Norman cider rye given to a dear friend who needed something nice to happen. A rye ciabatta to my neighbor, who heroically guards my front door from porch pirates while I’m traveling. A loaf of Dakota sour rye to hunting camp, where we slathered it with butter and ate it while drinking bourbon.

Over this year, I’ve grown skilled enough to start offering my own rye recipes, although to be fair (cue Letterkenny chorus) they are all inspired by rye recipes in the excellent book The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsburg; this is where you should start if you want to get into rye.

I’m almost ready to post my version of that cider rye from Normandy, but in the meantime, I do have two recipes posted over at Hunter Angler Gardener (Baker?) Cook:

• That ciabatta rye, a light, airy loaf that to me is perfect for a Minnesota summer.

• My Dakota sour rye, which is sturdier without being dense, and laced with caraway seeds, which to many are required in any rye bread. (Spoiler alert: They’re not.)

A slice of Dakota sour rye, ready for butter and jam.

I still have a long way to go. Many of the arcane, long-fermented, dark and sour rye breads of the Baltic regions and Russia elude me still, and I really want to master vollkorn bread, because it’s perfect for our cold winters.

But this whole process is more than about just bread.

Much like my desire to learn how to cross country ski, which was interrupted by our no-snow winter last year, this fascination with a difficult grain to work with has helped me through this huge life shift. No lie: Starting over in a new state, knowing only a few people, has been tough. There have been a lot of failures and false starts.

Baking a loaf or two of rye bread every week has settled me, allowed me to obsess about something complex and mysterious. It’s allowed me to fail safely. Over time, I’ve gained friends here. My rye breads are prettier. Things are not perfect. There are setbacks. But it’s better, and getting moreso day by day, loaf by loaf.

And that’s fine by me.