Homemade Rye Bread Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you make rye bread rise better? ›

Tip 2: White flour + rye flour = the highest-rising rye breads. For high-rising rye breads, use "white flour" – unbleached all-purpose or unbleached bread flour – in combination with rye.

A–The rye flavor in a rye bread comes from a combination of rye flour, caraway seeds and yeast. The sour flavor results from the addition of something with an acidic flavor–usually a sour dough culture or vinegar.

This recipe calls for 1 cup of rye flour and 3 cups of bread flour, and while you could play around with increasing the proportion of rye in this recipe (which is roughly 20% by weight), keep in mind that the more rye flour you use, the denser your bread will be.

Breads made from rye flour won't rise as much as those made from wheat flour. Bread made with 100 percent rye flour will be very dense, which is why many recipes add wheat flour to get a better rise. High-protein bread flour will help as well.

Kneading and baking

There's not much point in extensive kneading, because there's so little gluten to develop in a rye bread dough. Nevertheless, it's worth making sure everything is well mixed.

All rye breads need some wheat flour in order to properly rise, because rye is low in air-trapping gluten, so the real question comes down to the ratio of rye to white all-purpose flour. You can play with this recipe just by starting with the Master Recipe for a white country loaf that I put up on the site last week.

Rye bread also contains small amounts of zinc, pantothenic acid, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, and other micronutrients. Compared with regular breads, such as white and whole wheat, rye bread is typically higher in fibre and provides more micronutrients, especially B vitamins.

If moistened rye flour is given too much time to ferment, however, amylase will degrade rye's starches. The starch will not absorb water in the expected ratio. As a result, the bread's interior will be excessively moist and gummy, sticking to the knife as it's sliced.

Rye bread is often made with additions like molasses and cocoa powder, which add color and flavor. Caraway seeds can be added as well, for an even more distinctive flavor. While you can make a loaf that is made 100% rye, those tend to be quite dense and heavy.

To substitute by volume, start with this: 1 cup all-purpose flour is approximately equivalent to 1 cup + 2 tablespoons medium rye flour. For selected recipes, I added one more test: 125% rye (i.e., I used 25% more rye flour than the amount of all-purpose flour called for). More about that later.

Can I use the same amount of bread flour for all-purpose flour? ›

You can use all-purpose flour as a 1:1 substitute for bread flour and vice-versa. For example, for 1 cup of bread flour, you can use 1 cup of all-purpose flour. Bread and pizza crust made with all-purpose flour may have a little less chew than those made with bread flour, but the results will still be good.

The result is a heavy gummy bread. For this reason long fermentation and cold fermentation are best avoided. The methods used for baking with rye must control the amylase enzymes.

Rye gluten does not develop into strong and stretchy dough the way wheat gluten does and this means that any time you add rye flour to wheat flour you can expect the dough to be more fragile. It is also stickier and more absorbent. The more rye flour you have, the more pronounced the changes become.

Add Sugar

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

Bread doughs made with rye, especially those with a high percentage of rye, tend to be quite sticky and—to most American bakers—harder to work with. (To make up for this, any flour that is added to a rye dough recipe will usually be high gluten bread flour.)

Rye flour has a much lower ability to “rise” versus bread flour (because rye flour has less gluten than bread flour). If you increase the ratio of rye flour then the bread will be much more dense.

You can also put hot water in a heat-safe dish and place it on the floor of a cold oven (or on a lower shelf). The steam and heat from the water will help the temperature rise just enough that the yeast is active. The steam will also assist in keeping the surface of the dough moist so it will stretch as it rises.

The more water-binding polysaccharides a flour contains, the more water the dough will need. Rye flour contains higher levels of pentosans and β-glucans than wheat, varying from 6% to 12%. This gives rye better water-binding abilities than wheat flour, and it's why rye dough needs more water than wheat dough.