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Sour Dough for Rye Breads

A starter for rye bread made by mixing old rye dough with water and rye flour, then letting it ferment overnight.

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 rye bread dough in the water.

  2. Add enough rye flour to make a lukewarm sponge.

  3. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Use and keep the starter

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

  2. Each day, 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).

  2. Rye + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Bread and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Old rye bread dough
Carries live cultures and acidity that start fermentation and flavor the new dough.
Rye flour
Feeds the culture and thickens the mixture into a sponge that ferments steadily.
Compressed yeast
Gives extra rising power to the first batch before the starter is established.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand overnight. The sponge needs time at lukewarm temperature for wild cultures to multiply and become acidic. Too short a rest leaves the starter weak and slow to rise.

“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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