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Sour Dough for Rye Breads

A sourdough starter made from old dough, water, rye flour, and yeast for rye breads.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,320 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sour Dough for Rye Breads

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Dissolve the old dough in the water.

  2. Add rye flour to make a lukewarm sponge.

  3. Let the mixture stand until the next day.

Use and keep the starter

  1. Use the sponge with some compressed yeast for the first batch.

  2. Reserve a piece of the rye dough to use as a starter for the next day's batch.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Old dough
Carries live fermentation cultures and acidity that leaven and flavour the new sponge.
Rye flour
Feeds the fermentation and forms the body of the sponge.
Compressed yeast
Gives the first batch a rise before a natural starter is established.

The step that matters

Make a lukewarm sponge. Lukewarm warmth lets the fermenting cultures in the old dough become active without being killed by heat. A sponge that is too hot or too cold ferments poorly, weakening the rise and flavour of the starter.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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