Skip to main content
Main

German Rye Bread

A rye bread made from sour stock, water, salt, rye flour, and optional caraway seed or hop water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rye and caraway share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 87 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

German Rye Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the sour stock and sponge

  1. Save 4 lbs of dough from the last batch as sour stock.

  2. Refresh the sour stock with a little water and rye flour every 5 hours.

  3. Mix the sour stock with 8 gallons of warm water and rye flour to make the sponge.

  4. Add 4 gallons of warm water and 2 lbs of salt when the sponge starts to drop.

Shape and prove

  1. Break up the sponge.

  2. Form an upright dough.

  3. Let the dough rise once.

  4. Scale and mold the dough into loaves.

  5. Place the loaves in straw baskets to prove.

  6. Turn the basket onto a peel.

Bake and finish

  1. Wash the top of the loaves.

  2. Prick the loaves with a match.

  3. Bake the loaves in a hot oven (400°F/200°C).

  4. Wash the loaves again after 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 + carawaytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together87 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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

Sour stock
Provides fermentation and acidity that give the rye bread its characteristic sour flavor.
Rye flour
Supplies the gluten-poor structure and earthy flavor typical of rye bread.
Warm water
Hydrates the flour and activates the fermentation that leavens the dough.
Coarse sea salt
Controls fermentation speed and adds flavor to the dough.

The step that matters

Add the water and salt when the sponge starts to drop. Rye dough has little gluten, so its structure depends on the sponge being well fermented first. Adding salt too early slows the yeast and bacteria, while waiting too long lets the sponge over-ferment and lose strength.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes