Homemade Rye Bread Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the ratio of rye flour to bread flour? ›

With gluten playing such a vital role in yeast bread's structure, substituting rye at too high a percentage can lead to lower-rising, dense breads. Still, if you want to use rye in your favorite yeast bread recipe, start small: replace 25% of the all-purpose or bread flour with rye and assess the results.

Rye flour is low in gluten and high in carbohydrates called pentosans (aka arabinoxylans), which readily absorb water to produce a very sticky dough. Pentosans, unlike starch, remain moist after baking, yielding a dense loaf.

An excellent loaf of rye bread can be made with only 12 percent rye flour, a fermented wheat-flour starter, a pinch of commercial yeast, salt, and water.

How To Make Rye Bread. Proof the yeast: Add the lukewarm water and yeast to the bowl of your mixer. Give it a quick stir, and leave the mixture for 5-10 minutes to foam up. Form the dough: Add the brown sugar, salt, caraway seeds, oil, rye flour, and 2 1/2 cups of the all-purpose flour.

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.

While you can make a loaf that is made 100% rye, those tend to be quite dense and heavy.

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.

As with most grain products (e.g. breads and pastas), whole-grain varieties of rye bread will provide the most impressive nutritional benefits. Whole grain rye contains plenty of fiber, iron, calcium, zinc, potassium, selenium, manganese, copper, plant compounds, and B vitamins, including riboflavin, niacin, and B6.

The more white flour in the loaf, the higher it'll rise and the lighter its texture will be. So this is entirely up to you and your tastes. Experiment with different percentages of white flour/rye flour until you find the bread texture you like the most.

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.)

What is the healthiest rye bread? ›

The healthiest rye breads are made from 100% whole-grain sprouted rye flour, in addition to other sprouted grain flours. Since sprouting increases grains' fiber content, sprouted rye is higher in fiber and healthier than non-sprouted rye. One slice (28 grams) of sprouted rye bread provides : Calories: 60.

It's hard to tell with rye sometimes. The very best thing to do is get a probe thermometer. Bread is around 98 degrees C on the inside when it is done.

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.

The rich, brown colour of some rye bread (pumpernickel is the most famous example) is a result of molasses that is added to the dough. Molasses is dark brown and it turns the dough a dark brown. More molasses in the dough = darker brown dough.

They compete with the proteins that make gluten for water, and water is the substance that leads the proteins to combine to form gluten. This means that rye doughs often require a higher proportion of water than doughs in which wheat predominates.

(Rye flour can't be directly substituted for all-purpose or bread flour because it has different gluten-forming properties.)

Rye contains much less gluten than wheat, and the gluten rye contains is of poor quality when it comes to trapping air bubbles. Consequently, breads made with mostly rye flour do not expand as much as those made with mostly wheat flour. The crumb of breads in which rye predominates tends to be dense with smaller holes.

To turn all-purpose flour into bread flour you just need vital wheat gluten. Measure out 1 cup of AP flour, remove 1 1/2 teaspoons of the flour, replace with 1 1/2 teaspoons of vital wheat gluten, whisk to combine.

I wouldn't do 1:1. Rye has a lot less gluten which will affect structure quite a bit. The crumb will be a lot tighter, and rye is a strong flavour so you might find it overpowering.