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Bread

Rye Bread

A rye bread made with sourdough starter, rye flour, water, salt, and caraway seeds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Rye Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the sponge

  1. In a deep pan, mix the sourdough with the flour and lukewarm water.

  2. Add the salt and caraway seeds, then make a soft sponge and let it rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, work in the remaining flour to form a stiff dough.

  2. Knead the dough on a floured surface, turning it over and around to ensure even kneading.

  3. Shape the dough into loaves and let them rise for 1 hour.

  4. Brush the tops of the loaves with water and bake at 300°F (150°C) for almost 2 hours.

  5. Save a piece of dough for your next 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).

  4. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Apple + carawaytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sourdough
Acts as a starter whose wild yeast and bacteria leaven the bread and add tang.
Rye flour
Provides the bulk of the structure, though its low gluten yields a denser crumb than wheat.
Lukewarm water
Hydrates the flour so the starter can activate and gluten-like structure can form.
Caraway seeds
Contribute the characteristic aromatic flavour associated with rye bread.

The step that matters

Making the soft sponge and letting it rise overnight. The sponge must be left long enough for the starter's wild yeast and bacteria to develop; too short a rise leaves the loaves dense and flat, while the stiff dough added in the morning needs that fermentation to rise properly.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rye, flour, buttermilk, caraway):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rye, flour, buttermilk, caraway. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More rye bread recipes

Torte 7Indian 6Molasses 5Sourdough 4Graham 3Steamed 3 See all 103 →

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