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Features of wheat-rye dough

A source: 🔗 Author Elena Zheleznyak

Wheat-rye dough also has its own peculiarities in work and, depending on the percentage of rye flour in it, it is kneaded and fermented in different ways. It is customary to call wheat-rye bread, which contains up to 50% rye flour, if there is more of it, the bread immediately becomes rye-wheat or simply rye. It is customary for us to specify: wheat-rye, rye-wheat, but Europeans and Americans sometimes immediately call rye bread, even if it contains very little rye flour.

Features of wheat-rye dough

Kneading

We are used to kneading wheat dough until it “grabs”, stops being sticky and lumpy and turns into smooth and elastic. With wheat-rye and rye, everything is a little different: the more rye flour it contains, the more “different” its consistency and properties will be. As you know, rye flour also contains gluten and gluten (and products made from it are also not allowed for people with gluten allergies) and the percentage of protein in it is about the same as in weak wheat - about 10%. However, rye dough is not at all the same as wheat dough, it is sticky, heavy and does not stretch at all, and even if you knead it diligently for half an hour, it will not develop gluten. The development of gluten in rye dough is hindered by pentosans (mucus), which are very abundant in rye. They envelop protein cells and interfere with the formation of gluten filaments and films, as occurs in wheat dough. Knowing these features of rye flour, one can imagine how the wheat-rye dough will behave. The more rye flour there is, the more sticky and soft it will be, but this does not mean that wheat-rye or rye dough does not need to be kneaded.

Jeffrey Hamelman writes that it is customary to knead dough with rye flour content from 50 to 70% for 2-3 minutes at 1 or second speed. During this time, the dough should become smooth and, nevertheless, signs of the development of gluten should be visible, because there is a lot of wheat flour in it. When giving his recommendations, Hamelman speaks primarily about spiral mixers and kneaders, but I have a different type of kneading machine - with a rotating bowl, so I decided to test empirically how quickly my Ankarsrum Original kneads wheat-rye dough.

Here 60% whole grain rye flour and 40% whole wheat and first grade wheat mixture (50/50), second speed, 8 minutes of kneading.

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

And here is the finished bread and its crumb

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

If there is even more rye flour in the dough - from 70 to 90%, Hamelman advises kneading for 4 minutes at the first speed or 2 minutes at the second. It is really difficult to knead thick rye dough, it can resemble clay or putty in terms of coiness, so I do not advise anyone to knead it with your hands)) It is both difficult and difficult to wash your hands later. Of course, I also kneaded such a dough in my dough mixer. Here 80% fresh rye millstone flour and 20% whole wheat flour. In the finished bread, you will feel it in a row. Here is the dough at the beginning of the kneading, and here it is in 10 minutes at the second speed. It is very thick, so sometimes I had to help with a scraper, the dough turned out to be like this:

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

This is the kind of bread that came out of this dough.

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

And the last experiment with kneading dough with rye flour is 100% rye dough... There is definitely no need to develop anything, you will not see any sign of gluten development, but it is really important to mix everything until smooth, so that the flour is really well moistened and all the ingredients are well distributed. According to Hamelmann, this will take about 10 minutes at first speed.Here is my 100% rye dough at the beginning of the kneading, but at the end. Second speed, 8 minutes of kneading.

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

And here is 100% rye black bread.

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

I will share my observations and thoughts on kneading rye and wheat-rye dough. Of course, general recommendations on the time and intensity of mixing make sense, but it is worth focusing, first of all, not on time, but on the consistency and state of the dough. Thick rye or millet-rye dough will knead longer than soft and it is with such a dough that you need to be careful not to get it out of the kneader before all the ingredients are evenly combined and mixed. It often happens that such a thick dough already seems homogeneous, but if you observe it during the kneading process, you will notice a large piece of thick honey or unmixed salt.

Fermentation

Immediately after kneading, the rye dough needs fermentation and the temperature during fermentation should be quite high - 29-30 degrees. On the one hand, even at 20 degrees the dough will rise, but at 30 degrees it will be quite sour, which will allow you to get really high-quality rye bread. If you remember, temperature greatly affects both the rate of fermentation and the formation of the microflora of the sourdough: when it's hot, it ferments faster and the ratio of lactic acid bacteria and yeast changes in favor of the former. For rye dough, the high acidity of the dough is very important (you can read more about this in this article), otherwise the well-known defects of rye bread cannot be avoided: sticky crumb, temper, poor looseness. If you have a special proofing cabinet for dough (for example, like my Brod & Taylor), you can easily provide the necessary conditions, including the temperature range from 20 to almost 50 degrees, just by pressing the buttons several times.

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

I must say that if you bake wheat-rye, in which only half of the rye flour is, and you want to get non-sour bread, you can not follow such temperature recommendations. The optimum fermentation temperature for creating non-acidic bread is up to 25 degrees, and preferably 21-24.

Despite the fact that it is important for rye dough to accumulate acid, prolonged fermentation is contraindicated for it for several reasons. Firstly, rye dough has a weak gas-holding capacity due to the peculiarities of the composition of rye flour (gluten does not develop), secondly, the rye dough noticeably liquefies during fermentation (which is critical for hearth bread), and thirdly, it accumulates too a lot of acid and the bread will not taste good. And there is no need for a very long fermentation of rye dough, because during kneading a sufficient amount of well-fermented sourdough is introduced into the dough, which will form the taste and aroma of rye bread.

Features of wheat-rye dough Features of wheat-rye dough

And also, if you haven't noticed, the more rye flour in the dough, the faster it ferments. Jeffrey Hamelman has approximate data on the rate of fermentation of dough with varying percentages of rye flour.

Up to 40% rye flour - ferments for about 60 minutes;
From 40-60% - 45-60 minutes;
60-80% - 30 minutes;
· From 90-100% - 10-20 minutes.

He does not specify at what amount of sourdough in the dough and at what temperature fermentation takes place, but, I believe, at the optimum for rye, close to 30 degrees. Frankly speaking, my sourdough doesn't work out so quickly and almost always my rye or wheat-rye dough ferments for an hour and a half or two. Corresponding recommendations are also found in recipes for Soviet wheat-rye and rye breads. However, I note that in almost all recipes that include both a fermentation stage and a proofing stage, the first is always longer than the second. Do you understand why this is and not otherwise? If the fermentation is shortened, but the proving time is increased, the dough may eventually peroxide and float, which will not have the best effect on the bread, because immediately before baking you will no longer bend it, remove excess gas, and mold it.

This is not the first time I return to the topic of the stages of creating rye bread, and this is not the first time I repeat: almost always, rye dough should both come up (fermentation, fermentation) and distance itself before baking. On the net you can find recipes when immediately after kneading the dough is molded and sent to be allowed to stand in molds, and in most cases this technology is not very correct, since the dough still needs to rise once and then distance itself. This will allow it, again, to accumulate enough acid to form the correct taste and aroma. You can skip the fermentation stage if a very large amount of mature, well-fermented sourdough is added to the dough, as, for example, in this recipe for very simple rye bread.

And yet, so as not to get up twice, I want to answer a couple of questions that I was asked on the Internet regarding wheat-rye dough.

Starter quantity.
It is common for rye and wheat-rye bread to use a larger amount of starter than wheat bread. For comparison, if for wheat we take 5 grams. for dough, then for rye or wheat-rye, you can safely take 50 gr. Rye dough must be sour, this determines its quality. At the same time, if the rye flour in the dough is not more than 50% and you want to bake non-sour bread, make a thin dough (for example, 100% moisture), take literally 5 grams of starter per 100 grams. flour, ferment at a low temperature (20-24 degrees) and not until fully ripe, so that the dough is not sour, but creamy, sweetish.

Poorly loosened hard rye bread.
In addition to the fact that the poor crumb looseness may be due to insufficient acidic sourdough, there is one very simple reason why the crumb of rye bread turns out to be dense, and for one hard and coarse it is too thick dough. If you substitute whole grain flour for a recipe or use homemade millstones ground in your own mill, the dough will be thicker than necessary, keep this in mind. Whole grain millstone flour is more water-absorbing than roller-milled whole grain.

Bread that is sticky and moist, poorly loosened.
And if the dough, on the contrary, is too wet, and even if it is not baked (sometimes an hour is not enough), the bread will also be poorly loosened, but at the same time sticky and crumbling. I constantly step on the same rake and constantly under-bake my Borodinsky, and the last few attempts turned out to be generally indicative: at first the dough was too thick, because I did not adjust for millstone flour, and the bread turned out to be too hard and coarse. And the next time I added water, adjusted the consistency, but it was not baked and the bread came out sticky. What can you say, live and learn)

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