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Do you have a favorite recipe for every occasion? You do! Well here's your chance to share them with our readers.
Do you have a favorite recipe for every occasion? You do! Well here's your chance to share them with our readers.
Baking Recipes
Rye Bread Recipe
By: Kit Heathcock (2007-03-14)
This rye bread recipe is my best ever compromise. It is half rye flour, which reduces the amount of wheat in our diet, which my son’s asthma demands, but with the whole wheat and white flour it retains a soft texture and chewiness that the children like and avoids the tang of 100% rye bread made by the sour dough method.
Rye Bread
500g rye flour
450g whole wheat flour
(plus more for kneading)
50g plain white flour
1 tablespoon salt
1 10g sachet of instant yeast
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons oil
670 ml milk
125 ml water
Warm the milk to lukewarm. Mix the flours and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the middle and put in the yeast, then honey, then oil, pour on the warmed milk and water and mix, with a knife or your hands.
When it gets doughy turn out on to a well floured surface (it will be extremely sticky) and knead for 10 minutes. You will need to keep adding flour as you knead. It is better for it to be too sticky than too dry – you can always add more flour, but too dry will make a dry, hard loaf. After 10 minutes, when the dough will be elastic and rise up again when dented by your finger, put it back into the bowl with a plastic bag over it and leave in a warmish place for two hours or so until it has doubled in size.
Then knock down, firmly pressing out the air, but not over kneading, and form into two or three loaves on a flour-dusted or oiled baking sheet. Cover again and leave to rise for another hour. Bake for 30 minutes at 190C until the loaves sound hollow when you tap on the bottom. Cool on a wire rack
How do I keep track of the bread-making, in between school runs, mealtimes and the rest? Well I don’t always. There are times when I optimistically start the bread off, leave it to rise and four hours later remember about it, knock it down, forget to switch on the oven, so it has had an extra half day or so in rising by the time it gets cooked. It does seem to be very forgiving though – whatever you do to it, you do generally get bread out at the end, it may not always be the perfect loaf, but then variety is the spice of life after all.
I am finding that there is a certain wild card element in how the loaves turn out too. The weather. Humid muggy days have the dough rising at a faster rate, producing nicely domed, well-risen loaves. Some days the loaves are flatter and denser. My friendly local baker is working on the theory that the phase of the moon has something to do with it too, as he is working under much more controlled circumstances than I am and still gets inexplicable variations in his rye bread.
Another useful thing to remember if you’ve arrived at the end of the day and the dough has only just finished rising: you can leave the formed loaves to rise (covered) on their baking sheets in the fridge overnight, and then they are ready to bake in the morning. Give them half an hour to come to room temperature while the oven is heating and you can feast on fresh warm bread for breakfast.
Copyright 2006 Kit Heathcock
