Rye Bread, Grinding And Baking

This was a dud. But it was only my first attempt. It's the end of my series in making 100% sprouted rye bread. See here for buying the grain, here for soaking the grain, here for sprouting the grain. This is the exact same process I use for making my 100% sprouted wheat bread, with which I'm happy. Although the wheat bread I've made close to 100 times. I guess grains act differently.

The rye at the end of about 36 hours of sprouting. The wet towel and plastic wrap keep it moist:



Here are the sprouts. First indication that things aren't going well ... the grains are sprouting unevenly. Some oversprouted, some didn't sprout at all:



This is after I put the sprouts (and 1/4 teaspoon salt) through the food grinder twice. (I'm only using 1 cup of grains here instead of the 2 cups I use for wheat bread.) This looks okay, if a little wet. I didn't add any water when I kneaded:



The loaf formed, on parchment, and ready for the oven. Again, looks ok:



Gently placing it in a preheated dutch oven:



And here's the result after 3 hours baking and a couple hours setting up in a cooling oven. My rye dud. It spread too much. I suspect less gluten means less protein structure to hold it together while it baked. It also could have been too wet.



This is the underside. You can see the impression of the original loaf:



As much as I like baking free-form, I'd use a small loaf pan for this the next time. And I wouldn't rinse it while it sprouted to cut back on moisture. I'd sprout it less too, just 24 hours. The taste? To be honest, this grain isn't the freshest. I detect some rancidness, maybe due to older grains, the ones that failed to sprout. This is the difficulty in buying ingredients that don't have a decent turnover. I mean, who's buying whole rye berries? ________