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Rye Bread with Sour Dough

A rye bread made with a sourdough starter and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rye Bread with Sour Dough

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sponge

  1. In a large bowl, combine the water and sourdough to set a sponge.

  2. Use good rye flour and maintain a temperature of 65°F to 70°F.

  3. Allow the mixture to rise until it drops.

Make the dough

  1. Add 6 gallons of water and the salt to the mixture.

  2. Make a medium firm dough with ¾ rye flour and ¼ wheat flour.

  3. Let the dough rest until it shows signs of life.

  4. Scale and mold the dough into loaves.

  5. Allow the loaves to proof until they are half risen.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F to 450°F.

  2. Do not place the loaves too close together until they are well baked.

  3. Then move them closer to finish baking.

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 + wheattop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 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

Sour dough
Provides wild yeast and acids that leaven the bread and give it its sour flavor.
Rye flour
Adds a dense, moist crumb and a deep, earthy flavor to the loaf.
Wheat flour
Supplies gluten for structure, giving the loaf a lighter, more elastic crumb.

The step that matters

Proof the loaves until half risen. Proofing lets the yeast and bacteria build gas and structure. Loaves proofed too little can burst or stay dense, while overproofed loaves lose strength and collapse in the oven.

“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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