European Breads - Wonderful Taste and Chewy Texture
My husband and I have just returned home from Kosice Slovakia in Eastern Europe where we have lived for the last 18 months. What impressed us about the breads was the vast variety of tastes and textures. The Northern and Eastern European countries have developed their own traditional specialities, and the variety is impressive, with flavours ranging from sweet to sour to spiced: textures range everywhere from dense to hearty to light and airy: shapes and sizes can be round and square, gigantic and minuscule.
We were hard pressed to find anyone who made their own breads anymore unless we were in some of the villages, far away from major supermarkets, which carried a really large variety of delicious and in-expensive breads. Many people there have begun to abandon their traditional local breads in favour of American-style refined wheat products, so that ancient methods are being forgotten. Europe is known for their rye breads so we are going to begin this series on European breads with rye.
Rye bread is a living tradition. Baking with rye is an art quite different from, and more demanding than, baking with wheat. Nutritionally, wheat and rye are remarkably the same, but when rye flour is added to dough, the bread is denser, moister, darker, and better-keeping than an all-wheat bread. The dough can be sticky, tough--difficult to handle and to bake.
 Rye Flours -- There are government standards for what can be termed "rye flour" If it comes from a large commercial mill, though, it is almost sure to have had the bran and germ removed. "Rye meal" and "pumpernickel flour" are sometimes whole-grain, but you can't count on it. Probably the most reliable is stone-ground whole rye flour, but that is hard to come by. We truly believe that milling your own flour is the answer. Whole rye flour needs to be fresh. Once ground, rye deteriorates even faster than whole wheat; buy or grind just what you can use in five to six weeks, and store it in the refrigerator. Like wheat, rye flour should come to room temperature before it is mixed into dough.
Different Rye Flours- You may have noticed that there are 3 kinds of rye flour available--light, medium and dark. The tems lead you to think that you are buying refined, less refined and whole-grain flours, but actually they are all refined flours. Light rye flour is the whitest, most powdery-fine, and it has less starch and less protein than the dark rye flour. Medium rye is a blend of light and dark, and dark rye flour, though characteristically is coarser, still has all but the tiniest particles of germ and bran removed from it as well. Again milling your own is the only true way of getting all the nutrition the rye grain has to offer. We use the wonderful Nutrimill to do these grains.
Sour Rye Breads- Rye has a talnet for fermentation. Rye sours have a long tradition: not only do they impart unequaled fragrance and a savory tang to the finished bread, but they also condition the dough. Withou them, rye dough, particularly whole-grain rye dough, tends to be alkaline. The acid quality of a sour, and also its fermenting organiisms, keep the bread from being wet and gummy. Rye recipes without sourdoughs usually include some acid ingredients to achieve the same effect. Here is a great sour rye bread recipe that you can make in your Bosch Universal Plus machine. 
Making "Black" Breads - To darken the colour of any bread, include a little carob flour or powder, Postem or other cereal beverage, or cocoa. You can use dark liquids like coffee or prune juice, or the broth left after you steam raisins. Other ingredients that will darken bread: boiled, blended raisins, cooked black beans, black molasses (my personal favorite). Carob, like any of the others, can shout if you don't use a light hand, and weigh down the loaf as well. Just a little will do a great job of darkening. We were interested to learn that the traditional " black" breads were really brown, taking their colour from the whole grain flours of which they were made--rye or buckwheat, for example. Years ago the whole wheat flour was bolted to extract white flour for the upper classes, and then the poor folks' "black" bread was dark because it included extra bran and wheat germ. Try this great Black Russian Rye Bread recipe and see what you think.
Our next post will be on how to get the "chewiness" into your bread texture. |
Rye Flours -- There are government standards for what can be termed "rye flour" If it comes from a large commercial mill, though, it is almost sure to have had the bran and germ removed. "Rye meal" and "pumpernickel flour" are sometimes whole-grain, but you can't count on it. Probably the most reliable is stone-ground whole rye flour, but that is hard to come by. We truly believe that milling your own flour is the answer. Whole rye flour needs to be fresh. Once ground, rye deteriorates even faster than whole wheat; buy or grind just what you can use in five to six weeks, and store it in the refrigerator. Like wheat, rye flour should come to room temperature before it is mixed into dough.
