I was buying rye bread in a local shop, delicious for light summer lunches with cheese and salad. Now it isn’t available, and I was looking to make my own. This may need a tweak here and there to suit, but it works very well.
INGREDIENTS:
- 500g rye flour
- 2 tsp of dried yeast
- 1 tbsp treacle or brown sugar
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil
- 2 tsp salt
- 3 tbsp ‘8 seed mix‘ or ‘5 seed mix‘ from Seasoned Pioneers (or a mix of poppy seed, linseed, sunflower seeds, caraway, as you prefer)
- 2 tbsp pumpkin seeds
- 430ml water
METHOD:
- In a large mixing bowl, mix the seeds, flour and salt.
- In a measuring jug, measure out the water, sugar and oil, and add the dried yeast.
- Once the yeast has mixed into the water, add it to the flour mixture a bit at a time, mixing together to a dough, ensuring that all the flour is incorporated. You don’t want the mixture to be sloppy.
- Top tip at this point – if you have some left-over white bread dough, you can kneed a bit of this in as well.
- Coat a work surface with a bit more sunflower oil and kneed for ten minutes or so. The dough won’t be as stretchy as a gluten-based loaf, but it will get smoother.
- Form the dough into a loaf shape. I use a loaf tin, but you could make a cob loaf as well. Put the formed loaf into a tin or a baking sheet, cover with a teatowel and leave to rise for up to eight hours. I don’t usually wait as long, I like a dense and heavy rye bread.
- Heat the oven to 220C, and bake the loaf for 30 minutes, until it sounds hollow when tapped.
This works on the rye setting on my bread machine as well.