Make Fresh Milled Rye Bread with Sourdough Discard
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This fresh milled rye bread stays soft and has a really nice rye and caraway flavor. I’ve wrestled with rye for a while trying to figure out how to not have a loaf brick come out of my oven and actually have great rye bread and we’re finally here! I utilize both sourdough discard that has been fed with rye flour, as well as fresh milled rye flour and caraway seeds to give this loaf a nice complex flavor with the spicy, peppery rye and a bit of sour flavor from the sourdough starter. Sourdough discard bread is much quicker than waiting on sourdough to ferment and make enough gas to rise, versus slapping some yeast in it and knowing it will rise in an hour.
That’s my own impatience talking. I’m the problem, it’s me. Fermenting it a long time makes it a bit more sour than I’d like and it overpowers the rye flavor a bit and makes it more sourdough-ish. Go ahead and use this recipe as a guide and try if you’d like to skip the yeast and make it all sourdough. You definitely need to use this to make homemade reuben sandwiches because they are bomb! Enjoy the flavor and the nutritional benefits of a fresh milled loaf of bread without sacrificing flavor or texture.
What is Rye?
Rye is part of the wheat family and is frequently described as having a black pepper or clove-like flavor to it. It gives a nice spice flavor to the loaf. Rye is known to contain more fiber and B vitamins than regular ole wheat (we’re talking white wheat). Now. It doesn’t work great to make a loaf entirely of rye. I’ve tried and it gets so hard you can’t even cut it. My chickens wouldn’t even eat it. If someone else has figured out a way, they’re a wizard, because I cannot. If you want to mill your own rye flour, look for rye wheat berries or rye berries.
They are considerably more expensive than other wheat varieties due to them being a little harder and taking longer to grow from my understanding. You plant them in the fall and then harvest in the summer; I’m not sure how that differs from other wheat, I’m just going off of what a farmer told me and have not taken the time to do further research! haha! If you don’t have rye berries, try and locate a pure rye flour, whole rye flour, or whole grain rye flour as this will have the best flavor next to fresh milled.
How to Add Sourdough Discard to Just About Anything
When you want to adjust a recipe to accommodate sourdough discard, think of your starter as 50% water and 50% flour if you are feeding it at a 1:1 water to flour ratio… which most people do. I don’t measure my flour or water when I feed mine, but rather go off of consistency, so I just assume it’s probably 1:1 and it hasn’t failed me yet. This is the easiest way to substitute because once we starting talking about thirds, my brain shuts down! Look at your recipe and see if you have enough leeway to remove some flour and liquid from the recipe to add discard. Say you want to add 1 cup of sourdough discard. You would adjust the flour minus 1/2 cup and the water/milk/liquid minus 1/2 cup, also. So, if the recipe calls for 3 cups of flour and 1 cup of water, you could convert to to use discard by adding 1 cup of discard, 2 1/2 cups flour, and 1/2 cup water. Rather easy, huh?!
Why Bake by Internal Temperature
I have learned over the years that guessing when my bread is done is absolutely impossible, and even more so with fresh milled flour. Store-bought flour browns nicely in the oven and you can pretty well tell when it’s golden brown and done. Fresh milled flour, on the other hand, doesn’t do that so it’s been rather impossible for me to tell when it’s done. Rather than going on a hard and fast bake time because every oven is DIFFERENT, I promise, my recipes will tell you to bake for so many minutes and then place a thermometer into the center of the loaf set to alarm at 190 degrees F. This allows you to know exactly when they are done to prevent a dry, sad, overcooked loaf every time! And especially when using rye flour, because that stuff isn’t forgiving at all. It goes soft to dry brick in seconds, I swear!
I have my favorite thermometer linked in the recipe card. It has a magnetic display that you can stick to your oven or set up on the counter with a long, heat-proof probe you place in the loaf in the oven. It also has the capability to make it alarm once a certain temperature is reached that has been perfect for my needs. Everyone that bakes homemade bread needs one of these! Bread is considered baked at 190F to 200F. For my preferences, 200F is way to long and doesn’t create a loaf we enjoy. When baking in my cast iron pans, I’ve found that baking to 190F and then turning out right away creates the perfect crumb and doneness for my picky taste!
Equipment You Will Need
- Stand Mixer with Dough Hook Attachment
- Grain Mill
- Large Mixing Bowl
- Bowl Cover
- Cast Iron Loaf Pans
- Spice Grinder
- Thermometer
- Reusable Bread Bag
Ingredients
- water
- brown sugar
- active dry yeast
- hard white wheat berries
- rye berries
- sourdough discard or active starter
- olive oil
- lemon juice
- salt
- caraway seeds
Let’s bake some bread!
The day before you want to make this bread, try and remember to feed your sourdough starter with rye flour. I have found that by doing this, it adds a bit more of that rye spice flavor than if I feed it with something different. No big deal if not, but it does make a difference. It’s well known that sourdough starters LOVE rye flour. I have found that if my starter is rather sluggish after a long stretch of neglect, rye flour normally pulls it back together and it bubbles up like crazy!
Rye sourdough feeds are a match made in heaven apparently. For this recipe, you can use either active sourdough starter or discard, whatever you have. It is leavened with yeast so don’t sweat worrying about peak activity. The amount of starter in this recipe can be increased or decreased, just change your water and amount of flour measurements to accommodate as I explained above!
Step 1: Activate the Yeast
To the bowl of a stand mixer, add warm water, brown sugar, and active dry yeast. Stir to dissolve. Allow to rest until mixture is foamy, approximately 5 minutes. Do not skip this step because if you don’t activate your yeast, you won’t know if it’s active or not and you could potentially not have a nice rise on your bread! Be sure you have active dry yeast and not instant yeast. IF you have instant yeast, skip this step and add the same amount of yeast later on in the recipe after the rest period to rehydrate the grains.
Step 2: Mill the Flour
While waiting on the yeast, mill the hard white wheat and rye berries. I use my WonderMill on the “bread” setting. If desired, run the caraway seeds through a spice grinder. I skip this step because I like them left whole. Grinding will release more flavor initially.
Step 3: Make the Dough
To the yeast mixture, add in sourdough discard and 4 cups of the hard white wheat and rye flour mixture. Mix with the dough hook attachment on a medium speed.
While that mixes and with the dough hook running, add in lemon juice, salt, and caraway seeds.
With the dough hook still running, add 1/4 cup of flour at a time until a sticky ball forms and it begins to pull away from the sides. Turn off the mixer, cover, and rest the dough 20 minutes to rehydrate the fresh milled flour before adding more flour.
After the rest period, turn your mixer back to a medium speed and add flour a bit at a time until a sticky dough ball forms. If you are using instant yeast instead of dry active yeast, add it here and knead it in before adding more flour.
At this point, I remove the dough ball to a floured counter and hand knead. Add more flour as needed until the ball is just slightly sticky. Hand knead about 10 minutes. You want the dough to be soft and supple and smooth, but still a little tacky and have good gluten development. I go off how the dough feels in my hands versus worrying about the window pane test.
Step 4: First Rise
Transfer the dough to a large, oiled large bowl and toss to coat. Cover tightly with a reusable bowl cover, damp tea towel, or plastic wrap and set aside to rise in a warm place for about 1 hour, or until doubled. How fast this takes depends entirely on your room temperature. 70-75 degrees F should take about 45 minutes to an hour.
Step 5: Second Rise
After rise time, punch down the dough and turn out on the counter. Evenly divide the dough in half, cutting with a bench scraper, and shape to fit your greased loaf pans.
Place the shaped dough into cast iron bread pans, cover, and set aside to rise for about 45 minutes.
During the last 15 minutes of the rise time, preheat your oven to 375F. Let the dough rise until doubled; I allow mine to rise until the dough meets the top of the loaf pan.
Step 6: Bake
Place in the preheated oven and bake for 20 minutes. After this time, place a grill thermometer into the center of a loaf and set it to alarm at 190F. This ensures you don’t overbake the loaf as rye is not very forgiving. It will bake approximately another 10 minutes.
Once the internal dough temperature is 190F, remove from the oven and immediately turn out onto a wire rack to cool. Brush tops with butter to hold in moisture. Once cool, store in an airtight bread bag and consume within 2 days.
Notes:
- If you’re not going to eat it all at once, for best results, freeze either whole or sliced in a freezer bag for up to 6 months.
- Grinding the caraway seeds in a spice grinder or coffee grinder breaks them open to give a stronger initial flavor. I don’t do this because I like the look of whole seeds.
Happy Baking!
Equipment
- Stand Mixer with dough hook attachment
- Large bowl
- Spice Grinder optional
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups warm water
- 1/4 cup dark brown sugar packed
- 1 tbsp active dry yeast
- 3 cups hard white wheat berries
- 1 1/3 cups rye berries
- 1 cup sourdough started discard Fed with fresh milled rye flour the day before
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp caraway seeds
Instructions
- To the bowl of a stand mixer, add warm water, brown sugar, and active dry yeast. Stir to dissolve. Allow to rest until mixture is foamy, approx. 5 minutes.
- While waiting on the yeast, mill your wheat berries.
- To the yeast mixture, add in sourdough discard and 4 cups of the hard white wheat and rye flour mixture. Mix with the dough hook attachment on a medium speed.
- While that mixes and with the dough hook running, add in lemon juice, salt, and caraway seeds.
- With the dough hook running, add in flour 1/4 cup at a time until a sticky ball forms and it begins to pull away from the sides. Turn off the mixer, cover, and rest the dough 20 minutes to rehydrate the fresh milled flour before adding more flour.
- After the rest period, turn your mixer back to a medium speed and add flour a bit at a time until a sticky dough ball forms. At this point, I remove the dough ball to a flour counter and hand knead. Add more flour as needed until the ball is just slightly sticky. Hand knead about 10 minutes. You want the dough to be soft and supple and smooth, but still a little tacky.
- Transfer the dough to a large, oiled bowl and toss to coat. Cover tightly and set aside to rise for about 1 hour, or until doubled.
- After rise time, punch down the dough and turn out on the counter. Evenly divide the dough in half and shape to fit your greased loaf pans.
- Place the shaped dough into loaf pans, cover, and set aside to rise for about 45 minutes.
- During the last 15 minutes of the rise time, preheat your oven to 375F. Let the dough rise until doubled; I allow mine to rise until the dough meets the top of the loaf pan.
- Place in the preheated oven and bake for 20 minutes. After this time, place a grill thermometer into the center of a loaf and set it to alarm at 190F. This ensures you don't overbake the loaf as rye is not very forgiving. It will bake approximately another 10 minutes.
- Once 190F, remove from the oven and immediately turn out onto a wire rack to cool. Brush tops with butter to hold in moisture. Once cool, store in an airtight bread bag and consume within 2 days.
- If you're not going to eat it all at once, freeze either whole or sliced in a freezer bag for up to 6 months.
