I’ve been making bread most of my life. In the mid-1990s, I got really serious about making the sourdough loaves of my dreams. I am still using the starter that I built back then – it has travelled with us across the US and lives in several homes in the Seattle area. My favorite way of making loaves now is the levain method – you make a loaf of sourdough and before adding salt to the dough and baking the bread, you pinch off a golf-ball size of dough. Then, over the course of several days, you gradually add flour and water until you’ve built up a loaf or two amount of dough. This results in fantastic flavor and great texture because the yeasts are so happy.
More recently, I decided I wanted to make the classic rye loaf of my dreams. Rye flour can be hard to work with as there is less gluten to help a loaf keep its shape. I’m working with a rye starter built from my original sourdough and some interesting techniques to coax more flavor and great texture from the dough. One technique is to use an “old”. You cut a couple slices from an existing loaf of rye, cut off the crusts, tear it in small pieces and soak it in water overnight. This goes right in the new dough. It reminds me of the Czech bread dumplings my great-grandmothers made – the dough always included toasted bread cubes. Somehow, the toast cubes magically disappeared, producing light, fluffy, and delicious dumplings.
