If you come to Germany you need to experience this bread. For ages the Germans have baked bread with sourdough and rye. Traditionally rye has been used because it can already be planted starting September in the year before. It is able to survive the freezing temperatures of the winter. During early summer the crop can already be harvested and used.
This the standard German bread because it is the most common one in Germany. If you talk to Germans and they talk about German bread it is usually a variation of this bread. When traveling to other countries I did not see a place yet where bread like this was popular.
The final bread you bake will have a somewhat grayish color on the inside. That is why it is also called gray bread in Germany. In the picture above you can see a comparison of two rye breads. The left one has 80% rye and 20% wheat and the right one 100% rye. Notice how the right bread looks slightly darker from the inside than the left one. 100% rye breads are more popular in the south of Germany. Thus most people know usually a 50% wheat 50% rye combination. Many prefer a more ryeish taste with 80% rye, 20% wheat. This is what we will be baking in this recipe.
Please note that this is a quite difficult bread to bake. Reason being that rye behaves completely different than wheat. Rye has different proteins which do not stick together as much as in wheat. At the same type rye has special sugars known as "Pentosans". They stick to the gluten of the dough blocking the glutens from sticking together. Thus the dough becomes muck more sticky than regular wheat bread. Use more water on your hands when working the dough. At the same time flour the surface more then you would when baking wheat bread. Because of this the rye bread is usually never as fluffy on the inside as the wheat bread. However you will be surprised how excellent and unique this bread tastes.
- 400 grams of strong rye flour or full-grain rye flour.
- 100 grams of strong wheat flour or full-grain wheat flour.
Instead of feeding our mother dough with wheat flour we will feed the mother dough with rye flour. The mother dough will happily proceed and do its work with rye as well. Note in the final bake you might not have 80% rye, 20% wheat. This is because your mother dough might currently mostly consist of wheat flour. Do not worry about this. If you would like to have an even rye-isher taste, you can decrease the strong wheat flour and increase the rye percentage.
This is how my first ever baked 80% rye bread looked like:
This is how it looked like from the inside.
If you compare this with other recipes you will notice that the inside does not have similar air bubbles. This is because of the rye blocking gluten development.
You might also want to consider baking a 100% Bavarian rye bread. Bake two of them and test which one you prefer.