I usually make homemade bread a couple of times a week or more depending on how the week unfolds. By far the three types of bread I make the most are basic white, sourdough and French but any bread is fair game. I love experimenting with making specialty and whole grain breads. This really is where baking bread a home really pays off not only in flavour but in freshness.
Dark Rye Bread
Dark rye bread is a richly flavoured, specialty bread that we use for corned beef or beef sandwiches as well as enjoying topped with cream cheese. It is also a nice appetizer bread. This bread gets its deep, rich colour from black coffee which is a good way to use up left-over coffee from the morning pot of coffee. Molasses and the actual dark rye flour also add to colour as well as the flavour. I think it makes for a beautiful loaf of bread.
Dark Rye Bread
source: Garden Gnome
1½ c cold black coffee
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tsp salt
3½ c white flour
1¼c dark rye flour
3 tbsp gluten flour
1½tsp instant yeast
Place the dry ingredients into bowl of stand mixer. Mix on speed 1 until well mixed. Measure coffee, butter and molasses into measuring cup. On speed 1 slowly pour wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Adjust moisture level if necessary with a little extra coffee. Mix well then increase speed to 3 and knead until smooth. Remove dough hook. Form into a ball and place back in the bowl. Cover with damp towel. Allow to proof until doubled in size. Punch down, form into desired shape, let rise until doubled then bake at 200ºC/400ºF until loaf sounds hollow when tapped.
6 food lovers commented:
Nothing better than to be able to make your own bread... lovely rye
So right Dave! I make bread 3 or more times a week most weeks. It just smells so yummy! BTW, I know you can make bread because I've seen some of your results. They are nicely done :)
i love rye! i wouldn't never guessed you make it this way, though - i'll have to give it a go!
Oh Chey, you will like homemade rye bread. It's so easy to make too!
I'd love to make some rye or pumpernickel, but I don't use coffee for religious reasons and it seems that all of these recipes call for coffee in them. sigh
Remember that the Back to Basics mill will not grind flour as find as an electrical mill will grind it. If that's ok, then you will like the mill, if not, then you won't be happy with it. It grinds to a consistency of corn meal. Not quite as course as store bought, but not nearly as fine as the electric mills.
One thing you could do would be to mix the ground flour with some of the water from your recipe and whirl it in a blender. That would make it more fine. You wouldn't have enough liquid in the recipe to do all of the flour like that, but it would help. The other thing would be to allow the flour to soak in the water so that it rehydrate. You'd have to do something on the order of a "poulash" I think it's called. Where you mix the dough, refrigerate it and then bake with it the next day. And you'd probably want to make the dough wetter than you normally would - again more of a batter than a dough. When the whole wheat flour has had time to hydrate, the batter will turn to dough. In fact, I had a problem with getting my whole wheat dough "right" as it was mixing in my bread machine, only to have the dough a little too dry by the time it was ready to bake - and that's with normally milled flour (fresh milled). As with anything, store bought "whole wheat flour" has been sitting around and absorbed the moisture in the air (here in the humid south) so it doesn't need as much liquid to hydrate it as freshly ground wheat will need.
Thanks so much for your tips on grinding grains Darlene. I think I best stick to an electric grinder so need to do a bit more research.
Traditional rye and pumpernickel breads do use left-over coffee. I'm wondering if you could us chicory instead. That would fit with your needs and hopefully get fairly close to the flavour of these traditional breads.
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