2017 | No. 99

Real Rye Bread
Why It’s So Rare and Difficult to Make

By James MacGuire
Bakery photographs by Andrew Axilrod

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The tender crumb was brown tinged with gray; the rich brown crust was shiny, almost leathery, but tender. The aroma was dark and grainy, both lactic, like fresh cheese, and tangy, like subtle vinegar, with a hint of dark pipe tobacco. The finish was intense and the pungent acidity on the tongue was slow to dissipate, a bit unnerving, like the very first sip of some unfamiliar dark beer that makes you want to give it another try. I was in Germany not long ago for the first time, and this was a prime encounter with good German rye bread.

It was nothing at all like the rye bread we know in North America, which for a ham sandwich at a deli is better than insipid white bread and mandatory with hot pastrami or corned beef. Many Americans think our rustic-seeming fluffy black “pumpernickel” is “the real stuff,” but it contains very little actual rye. It can’t even be called a parody. It’s not sourdough at all, as rye bread always was and still is in Germany and other northern countries. And while many Americans think the caraway seeds, often ground to a powder, in our “rye bread” are what rye itself tastes like, in Germany, for instance, they aren’t necessarily added. Late in life I felt the joy of discovery of rye along with, as a professional baker, some guilt over why it had taken me so long.

Winter rye is the hardiest of cereals, the last crop to cease growth in the fall and the first to start again in spring, at temperatures just above freezing. Thanks to what are called antifreeze proteins, it can survive temperatures as low as -35 degrees C (-31 degrees F), even without a protective blanket of snow. In more temperate climates as well as cold ones, its resistance to drought and its low soil fertility needs (the lowest of all cereals) make it a good choice for organic and ecologically minded growers. But 90 percent of the world’s rye is grown in northern Europe, mainly in Germany, Russia, and Poland, and northern European rye breads are so iconic that it’s difficult to believe rye itself is not indigenous to the region.

In fact its origins are in southern Anatolia, but unlike wheat and other gramineae from that same broad area, no samples have been found at ancient Egyptian archeological sites, nor is there mention of rye in ancient Greek documents. Yet rye had already been domesticated by the Neolithic age, having arrived in northern Europe hidden in the seed of shipments of wheat and barley, its close relatives. For winter rye to flower and form seed, it must spend a few weeks at or near freezing between fall planting and spring regrowth. That’s why rye didn’t spread to the warmer Mediterranean region; it might have grown there but it couldn’t produce seeds. In northern Europe, its hardiness and competitiveness allowed it to thrive even as a small percentage in crops of wheat or barley and outlast them over time.

It’s difficult to pinpoint when rye was first deliberately cultivated on its own. First rye (Secale cereale) had to evolve from a perennial wild grass (S. montanum) to an annual weed and through Vavilovian mimicry (unintended selection) acquire the characteristics of its hosts vital to its survival. That meant the ability to stand up and grow straight, to form large grains, and to hold its seeds tightly enough that it could be harvested before the seed was spontaneously released to the soil, as the seeds of wild plants are. In The History of Rye Production in Europe, Karl-Ernst Behre pursues the question of when rye was first planted as its own crop. Pure samples of seeds from prehistoric sites are misleading because at harvest, only the ears of the plant were collected by hand, and since rye looks different and grows taller than wheat, it was easy to avoid. Though the cooler climate during the first century BC might have been a factor in rye’s emergence as a separate crop, the true cause was almost certainly a complete change in grain harvesting. The pre-Roman Iron Age saw the introduction of scythes and, later, simple harvesting machinery. Whole plants began to be cut at ground level; the work went quickly, so avoiding rye was impossible and ever-increasing percentages of it were mixed with succeeding crops. In those difficult-to-farm places where rye did well, growers developed the necessary farming methods and people learned how to bake with it.

Rye crop at Thornhill Farm, Greensboro, Vermont. Photograph by Todd Hardie

Under humid conditions, rye is prone to sprouting even before it’s harvested, as well as during storage. Sprouting means high enzyme activity, so bakers had to deal with both that and its consequence: sticky, difficult doughs. In extreme cases, bread could not be made. Mastering rye was one of the greatest challenges that bakers anywhere have faced, but rye bread emerged as a unique and delicious form of bread. World-class.

 

The French, for all that they excel at baking with wheat, are not good at rye bread. It persists in Auvergne, Brittany, and Alsace. Elsewhere it’s almost exclusively an accompaniment to oysters and other shellfish, especially around Christmas. My knowledge of baking came entirely from France, and I gained a better understanding of rye only in the early 1990s when I met Walter Koehn, a baker and fellow presenter at a conference at the American Institute of Baking. Then I discovered a German apprentice’s manual, published in 1988 and translated into English as Baking: The Art and Science.

The thinking at that time, which remains valid as far as it goes, focused on two characteristics of rye flours. In dough, they form very little gluten and they contain a lot of substances called pentosans; together that prevents the making of an elastic, light loaf.

When water is added to wheat flour and mixed, the proteins glutenin and gliadin link to form gluten, which gives the dough the elasticity and stretchiness necessary to capture the CO2 of fermentation and create a light loaf of bread. Rye also contains gliadin and glutenin but in much smaller amounts and different ratios. Even more problematic is that, compared to wheat, rye contains a high percentage (7 to 10 percent by weight) of cellulose gums called pentosans, which can absorb up to 10 percent of their weight in water. This deprives the rye’s glutenin and gliadin of the water they require to link up and form a stretchy gluten structure. Without that gluten, although the pentosans allow you to make a 100-percent rye dough, it won’t be elastic and the loaves will be heavy, so most of the time wheat flour is added to ensure some lightness (more finely textured rye meals and flours also produce lighter loaves, but that isn’t necessarily what rye is about). At the seminar, Walter Koehn pointed out that if there were a bread map of Germany, it would show 100-percent rye loaves in the north and to the south increasing percentages of wheat flour as more wheat became available, until the loaves contained more wheat than rye. To be called “rye bread,” in Germany a loaf must be at least 90 percent rye. Loaves with less than that, down to 50 percent, are called Roggenmischbrot (“mixed rye bread”), while reversing those percentages yields Weizenmischbrot (“mixed wheat bread’). Actual Weizenbrot must contain at least 90 percent wheat. The most common German rye loaves contain 60 to 70 percent rye and are often oblong, with a slightly shiny crust that bears the swirled imprint of the baskets in which the dough rises.

In wheat doughs, amylase enzymes usefully transform the small percentages of starches damaged during milling into sugars that fuel fermentation and the browning of the crust. For the intact starches to be affected by the enzymes, they must first be gelatinized during baking (swollen as they absorb water), but by that point, they have been deactivated by the heat. The key with rye is that the starches are gelatinized at much lower temperatures than wheat, 55 versus 65 degrees C (131 versus 150 degrees F), creating a window of opportunity for what’s called the “starch attack” by the enzymes, which are at peak activity at 50 to 52 degrees C (122 to 127 degrees F). In this way, all the newly gelatinized starches could potentially be broken down into sugars. This is the soul of brewing, where the resulting sugars are fermented into alcohol, but in rye dough the effect can be spectacularly disastrous. Worst-case scenario photographs show cross-sections of loaves with the crust forming a shell around the outside, a gaping empty space beneath, and just above the bottom crust, a puddle of puddinglike starches. Fortunately in rye sourdough, the acid conditions and presence of salt are sufficient to keep the enzymes in check and prevent the worst case from happening. You often hear the phrase “sour rye,” but for artisanal loaves with respectable proportions of rye, there’s no other kind!

 

In the 1970s, Frank Sugihara and Leo Kline investigated the microbiology of San Francisco sourdough bread; theirs remains the classic work on wheat sourdoughs, and the same principles apply to rye. The defining elements are a lactic bacterium (think sauerkraut, not cheese), which they baptized Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, and a wild yeast called Candida milleri (nothing to do with commercial baker’s yeast), both of which are found in flour and all around us. No one has yet isolated sanfranciscensis from nature, but it has to be there somewhere. And now we know other lactic bacteria can also play a role. Unlike regular baker’s yeast added to dough as a pure ingredient, sourdough bakers hold back a piece of dough from their last batch and feed it with flour and water to maintain it. When it’s time to bake another batch of bread, the culture is “built” by adding increasing amounts of flour and water over 18 hours or so, to make it lively and assure a sufficient quantity. One, or more often two, builds are used for wheat sourdoughs. Artisanal sourdough fermentations for both wheat and rye are generally performed at room temperatures (20 to 26 degrees C, or 68 to 82 degrees F), and the general perception is that moister doughs and temperatures at the warmer end of the spectrum yield lighter loaves with more lactic flavors, while stiffer doughs and lower temperatures yield denser, more vinegary loaves. German rye sourdoughs behave the same way and use up to three builds. As little as 2.5 grams of starter culture can produce 100 grams of rye sourdough by the time it’s ready to use.

Rye baking is a big departure from the wheat baker’s mantra: mix well to form gluten and ferment long for an airy crumb, full flavor, and good keeping. With rye, only the relatively small percentage of wheat flour in the recipe provides gluten, so mixing is fairly short to avoid breaking that gluten down, and the bulk fermentation and final rise of the shaped loaves are also relatively short, although mixing and fermentation times increase with higher percentages of white flour, especially over 50 percent.

So far, so good. But the first loaves I baked as I began to explore rye seemed dry and tough, and turned stale after only a day or two. I blamed myself, but eventually wondered whether the flour might be a factor. In colonial New England, settlers turned to rye in especially cool, damp areas where wheat crops failed. (A vestige of the old use of rye is its presence in Boston brown bread.) Over time, as with wheat, US rye cultivation shifted to the Midwest and Northwest, where drier conditions make rye easier to grow with much less danger of sprouting and resulting enzyme activity. But there’s a catch. “Starch attack” might sound like a disaster to be avoided at all costs, but it is crucial to obtain the moist and yielding crumb so desirable in rye bread. It’s all a question of degree, and almost always lack of enzyme activity rather than too much poses the most serious challenge.

Enzyme levels are measured using the Hagberg Falling Number test. Flour and water are mixed into a slurry that’s heated until it thickens, to form something akin to a white sauce. A pistonlike plunger is then allowed to float down the cylinder and the number of seconds it takes to reach the bottom indicates the viscosity of the mixture. High enzyme activity breaks the starches down into sugars and makes the slurry more liquid, leading to a faster descent — lower falling numbers. It’s counterintuitive: lower numbers mean faster. German technicians consider 120 to 150 seconds to be the ideal range for rye breads, but North American rye often tests in the 300s. With sticky disasters in mind, most North American mills think they’re doing bakers a favor by refusing shipments of rye with numbers below 180.

 

The thing is, very little rye is grown in the US anyway, just 11.5 million bushels in 2015 compared with two billion bushels of wheat, and three-quarters of that rye goes for animal feed, alcoholic beverages, and other uses besides bread. To large milling companies, rye is what a baker friend of mine calls “an unwanted stepchild.” It’s not just the low volumes; the water-absorbing pentosans tend to cause clumping during milling, so rye really needs specialized equipment. Some mills find themselves contracting their rye flour production to their competitors. Perhaps needless to say, there has been little research into the use of this rye to make bread. The persistent rumor among North American bakers that our rye isn’t suitable for bread, because the varieties grown are chosen with animal feed in mind, is difficult to confirm, but it is true that lower-falling-number rye, turned pasty by enzymes, is difficult for monogastric animals, such as pigs and chickens, to digest. In any case, although variety can be a factor in rye falling numbers, the biggest influence is growing conditions.

One more factor affecting quality is that rye is milled close to where it’s grown, so by the time the flour reaches bakers in other parts of the country, it’s old. This is not just a question of the fats turning rancid, as with whole wheat; with age the gelatinization temperatures of the starches (the point where they swell during baking and become vulnerable to the starch attack) increase to a point where there is no longer a window of opportunity for starch breakdown by the enzymes. My informal survey of bakers in different parts of the US and Canada revealed that most were using flours that were two and three months old, yet in my own experience, the handicap makes itself known within a month of milling. This means that sourcing flours with falling numbers within the desirable range is useless if the flour is too old. This little-known problem may be the most common impediment to baking great rye bread in North America.

No US federal standards define rye flour types, only trade practice, which seems to mean what a few large mills do most of the time. And no federal or state laws dictate a minimum rye content in “rye bread,” making Canada’s 20 percent minimum seem downright despotic. It’s easy for bread snobs to turn up their noses at “deli rye” bread, made with wheat flour and 25 percent tasteless white rye (from the center of the rye berry with virtually no bran content and often bleached), but when European bakers arrived on these shores, they found unsuitable rye, resistance to the true style outside of ethnic neighborhoods, and a lack of workers who knew how to bake it. To tell the truth, deli rye, especially without caraway, is not completely without interest. A number of artisan bakers around the US produce it using good technique and more flavorful medium- or whole-rye flour. The deli style has its place — just don’t call it rye bread.

 

In Germany, you would think that finding good rye flour is the least of a baker’s worries, but there’s an elephant in the room. Bread authority Jürgen-Michael Brümmer boldly addresses it his rye chapter in The Future of Flour (published in English in 2006 by the German baking-ingredients manufacturer Mühlenchemie). Incredibly, low-enzyme-activity flours have become the rule in Germany too. “Increasing falling numbers and Amylogram values” — the latter another measure of enzyme activity and flour performance — “have established themselves almost unnoticed partly because of selection by breeders, partly because of more favorable weather.” Brümmer calls the 1970s introduction of hybrid varieties, which now account for 75 percent of the rye grown, “a tremendous step forward,” because of higher yields and better genetic resistance to sprouting, but in terms of bread quality it’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The hybrids require better soils and growing conditions, which produce those high falling numbers. Loaves are less tender and moist, less flavorful, and they quickly turn stale. In 1960, average falling numbers were 110, and by 2004 they had increased to 240, with recent harvests more in the range of 265. Loaf volume is only 85 percent of what it was! And that’s in Germany.

When I met Peter Stolz, a charming and effusively enthusiastic sourdough researcher — I couldn’t take notes fast enough — at the Europain trade show in Paris last year, I mentioned happening on a rye flour where I live in Montréal with a falling number of 127. His immediate response, with a laugh, was “Where can I get some?” An instant later his tone darkened as he muttered, “Something has to be done.” Yet little seems to have changed since Brümmer’s chapter appeared more than ten years ago, even though at the time he had suggested that, as with wheat, a baking test should be part of the standard analysis of rye quality, but high yields and worry-free harvests have clearly won out over low falling numbers.

Professor Doktor Brümmer spent 40 years at the Institute for Cereal, Potato, and Lipids Research (now the Max Rubner Institute) in Detmold, which is well known to rye bakers for its work on codifying one-, two-, and three-stage sourdoughs, referring to the number of steps each method requires. By the time Brümmer retired, he was head of baking and co-director, and he remains a major figure in German baking. In photographs, he appears tall and muscular, with a carefully trimmed full beard and the distinguished air of a tweedy country gentlemen. During a Skype conversation I held with him last year (with baker and teacher Harry Peemoeller of Charlotte, North Carolina, translating), he was grave at the outset, admonishing me to “be prepared to be disappointed,” but soon he was more upbeat, making it clear that baking good rye bread is possible. He needed no prodding as he explained his view of the current situation in a soothing baritone, and spoke with the clarity of an experienced and entertaining teacher, pausing slightly when he knew we would laugh. At the same time, he couldn’t resist teasing me by wondering aloud if “wheat eaters” would appreciate any of what he had to say. He allowed that the addition of malt flour or alpha-amylase enzymes could be helpful in dealing with high-falling-number flours, but that it’s only a partial solution. His focus was instead on finding ways to make the best of a bad situation, to have a more tender crumb and good flavor even without enough starch attack. He talked about dough texture, stressing the ideal that, rather than steadfastly holding its shape without give, it must “flow.”

Pentosans are large molecules comprised of five-carbon sugars. Most of them are arabinoxylans, the main form of fiber in rye. Cold and wet growing seasons produce smaller rye berries with greater percentages of the pentosans. They can be either soluble in water (around 25 percent) or insoluble (the other 75 percent), and as with falling numbers this depends upon growing conditions and, to some extent, on rye varieties. The proportions change during the fermentation of the dough, but greater numbers of solubles at the outset get things off to a good start. Then during fermentation, enzymes and the acidic conditions of the sourdough break down the complex insolubles into their constituents, making them soluble. This is key to rye dough texture because higher percentages of water-soluble arabinoxylans yield a softer dough, greater loaf volume, a pleasing aroma, and a darker crust. Examination of the baked loaves reveals a crumb moist enough that on the following day, the back and forth slicing of the knife leaves a few tiny worm-like crumbs, where a gummy buildup on the blade would indicate an all-too-rare excess of water-soluble arabinoxylans and enzyme activity. Conversely, greater numbers of intact water-insolubles lead to a less-plastic dough, reduced volume, and a compact, dry crumb. In my experience, once sliced, the exposed surface of these loaves starts to dry before the end of lunch. Pentosans have always played this role in making rye bread, but it took the problem of increased falling numbers in modern rye for us to understand the importance of their role.

In terms of mechanics, when the dough is made, a thick gel is formed composed of water-soluble arabinoxylans, which dissolve, and water-insoluble arabinoxylans that instead bind much water (swelling but not dissolving); gel is also formed when the pentosans react with small amounts of naturally occurring ferulic acid (called oxidative gelation). The acidity of sourdough is important to the process, explaining why, even though faced with virtually no danger of excess starch attack during baking, Brümmer recommends an increase in sourdough content from the classic 35 to 40 percent of the rye flour used to 50 percent. You can see the swelling as the dough is mixed, when after a time rye flour and meal particles appear to become coated by a thick liquid in the same way as oatmeal or risotto. As if to leach out what the Germans call these “swelling substances,” doughs made from rye flours are mixed at very slow speed for ten minutes or so, but coarser rye meals require up to an hour, as if to coax the gelling substances to emerge. In either case, even virtually glutenless 100-percent rye doughs become smoother and slightly stretchy. This is what Brümmer meant by a dough that “flows.” During the fermentation that follows, the conversion from water-insolubles to water-solubles continues, softening the dough. In only the most extreme cases, never seen these days, so much water is released that doughs can become too liquid to shape and process.

Professor Brümmer assumed I was aware that the overwhelming majority of German bakers rely on commercial sourdough cultures. It slipped right by me when he said it, but wheat lovers’ shock soon kicked in. Adding commercial sourdough cultures is a thing most North American artisan bakers spurn with fanatical vehemence. In context, the reasons are understandable. In Germany, research into the microbiology of sourdoughs predates that of Sugihara and Kline by about a century. Böcker obtained a patent for its first commercial culture in 1910, and today its Reinzuchtsauerteig outsells all others. The practice is so established that in 1984 Baking: The Art and Science dismissed the centuries-old practice of cultivating one’s own spontaneous cultures from the wild in a single sentence containing the phrase “not recommended”! However, this is not to say that each and every batch of bread begins with an envelope of powdered sourdough. Bakers buy tubs of refrigerated fresh sourdough that they propagate using the method of their choice. Perhaps this is enough to allow them the impression that it’s their own.

Three-stage sourdoughs are extremely rare these days, replaced by simply mixing all the flour and water at once with a small amount of inoculum, so that the dough matures slowly over 15 to 18 hours. (This tactic now so dominates that Brümmer calls it “die exklusive Führung” — the only stage.) One-stage methods include the Berliner short method, Monheimer salt sour, and others, but especially the Detmolder one-stage. These methods work, but every recipe I’ve seen includes baker’s yeast, yet another thorn in the side of wheat purists, but universally accepted in Germany for decades. The inexorable logic of this divides fermentation into two separate parts: the sourdough is there for flavor and acidity, and the yeast creates the rise. Personally, I take this with a grain of salt, but the approach is certainly necessary in industrial methods using temperatures that considerably exceed the wild yeasts’ optimal reproduction temperature of 27 degrees C (80 degrees F).

Since bakers are adding these commercial cultures each day, one might wonder why they don’t purchase the culture just once and then propagate it on their own. There’s a simple answer: brand-new cultures started from scratch with rye flour and water harbor many diverse organisms at first, but in a matter of days dwindle to the few acid-tolerant lactic bacteria and yeasts usually found in wild rye sourdoughs. The population can differ by region, seasons, and individual bakers’ ways of doing things. But Peter Stolz explained, Böcker finds that L. sanfranciscensis and the wild yeast C. milleri (the pair discovered by Sugihara and Kline) work together beautifully and produce the best results. Although Böcker has maintained a stable culture for 80 years or so (confirmed by a ten-month intense microbiological study in 1990), the firm strongly recommends that artisan bakers working in less-controlled conditions replace the culture every week or two because continuous propagation (the inelegant technical term in English is “backslopping”) over longer periods runs the likely risk of infection by indigenous invaders that could outcompete them and take over. The advantages of cultures such as Böcker’s are undeniable: guaranteed results, consistent flavor profiles, predictable performance, and, if things go very wrong, a back-up tub of pristine culture standing at the ready in the refrigerator. Few bakers can resist. The fun of in-house sourdough is that it was and remains a blend of science, empiricism, and perhaps a bit of superstition — the percentage of rye flour used in M. Rohrlich’s classic “Biochemistry of Rye Bread Production” is a curiously unscientific-seeming 49 percent — but now the implication seems to be that not clinging to the commercial life preserver would be somehow recklessly irresponsible.

 

There were two more German practices of which I knew nothing: the addition to rye dough of beet and malt syrups and the addition of leftover bread. Beet and malt syrups can darken crumb color, soften it, and aid the browning of the crust. Whole loaves of bread, usually a day or two old, are ground up with a deafening noise in what looks like a huge blender, and then softened by soaking in water before use. They are allowed in amounts up to 20 percent of the flour weight in recipes with high percentages of rye. The old bread softens the loaves’ texture, and its proponents say it increases flavor. My own wheat-eater’s feeling is that it doesn’t improve the texture, and it injects the flavor of the old bread’s crust into the inside of the loaf rather than celebrating the difference between the two. I drew the line when I learned that IsernHäger sells cultures and a technology that allow bakers to transform this week’s old bread (replacing up to 50 percent of the flour weight) into all of next week’s seed culture; that doesn’t sit right. The old bread seems to be traditional, though for many bakers, perhaps something that has “always been done” only goes back as far as what they saw during their apprenticeships. Or possibly the use of syrup and old bread was so widespread that recipes assumed them and didn’t mention them. In any case, in recent decades there seems to have been an increase in the use of both syrups and old bread. There is no mention of them in Baking: The Art and Science, and the first volume of a professional baking manual titled Brotland Deutschland, published in 1989, mentions the possibility of old bread but in distant formal language as though begrudgingly, and there are no syrups. Yet the Brotland volume on whole-grain breads, published in 2000, lists both in almost every recipe, and to boot, gives the coup de grâce to traditional three-stage sours by banishing them from the individual formulas. A modern sweet tooth might partially explain the syrups, but it cannot be a coincidence that both these products address problems attributed to flours with high falling numbers.

I once had a conversation with a Frenchman who had done his obligatory military service in the 1970s and said that at the time war games were a complete joke, because it was inconceivable that the enemy could attack from anywhere but the direction of Germany. The same applies to paranoia over the basically extinct threat of rye dough experiencing an extreme starch attack. With hybrid varieties and climate change, the days when sprouting could potentially ruin entire harvests or even cause excess gumminess in the baked loaves are a distant memory. The situation seemed clear enough that by the time he wrote his original article, Brümmer suggested that falling numbers could be lowered and baking performance greatly enhanced by pushing back harvest dates, citing an example where rye with numbers of 240 had fallen to 175 four weeks later. But perpetually worried farmers must have been incredulous, and there was little interest from most bakers, who have been completely docile in their acceptance of the disheartening new realities. These days, there are hints that Germany might be on the cusp of a real-bread movement similar to that in the US 25 years ago, but for now, the huge body of scientific knowledge and coldly pragmatic approach to things appear to have locked rye baking into a dogma that few bakers are willing to buck. Just as computers have robbed auto enthusiasts of the pleasure of making their own Saturday afternoon repairs, there now exist technologies that are beyond bakers’ grasps. IsernHäger sells a process that uses special starters (IsernHäger AromaStück) with which to steep flours and grains at 65 degrees C (150 degrees F) — brewing temperatures. That produces maltose-based aromatic compounds, leading to bread with malty flavors and a darker crumb, something that can’t be done using only the classic mix, ferment, and bake process. Surely not all German bakers take things that far, but hearing that made me determined to visit a more traditional bakery.

Bernd Kütscher heads the Akademie Deutsches Bäcker Handwerk, a school that among other things trains and certifies master bakers. Of his three suggested bakeries (plenty for me but I wondered how many more he could have come up with), I chose Arno Simon’s bakery, because it had been recommended also by a friend and its website made clear that it maintains its own sourdough and practices the full three-stage sourdough process. It took most of a day to drive from Paris to Löhne-Gohfeld in northwestern Germany. I arrived, with my good friend and bread aficionado Andrew Axilrod, with just enough time to find a hotel in the quiet spa town of Bad Oeynhausen and pretend to sleep for a couple of hours before heading to the bakery. We spent 48 hours on a baker’s reverse schedule (night work, daytime rest), driving back and forth past the big-box stores and fast-food outlets followed by empty quiet streets. It felt like a no-man’s-land, especially because we never saw the centers of Löhne or Gohfeld.

 

We arrived at midnight in the pitch black. From the outside, the Bäckerei Simon appeared large (there are 500 customers a day plus a wholesale business). We could hear the buzz of a very busy bakery inside but spent many minutes outside trying to find an unlocked door. We were greeted by Alexander Schmidt, the tall, wiry, young head baker, who seemed bewildered, as though we weren’t expected, but rolled with the punches. (Don’t believe anyone who assures you that language is no longer a problem in Germany because all young people speak English. Understanding one another was indeed an issue.) Schmidt’s principle responsibility is mixing doughs, and he was kind enough to show me the printouts of the recipe quantities being used for that day’s production. Through gestures and painfully slow but animated talk, in broken English and German, I learned details such as falling numbers. Often two mixing machines were working at once as a third was being filled with ingredients, so although I had many questions, I couldn’t slow him down by asking too many. Had I not done so much research beforehand, I would have been lost.

In the larger adjacent room, the pace was also frenetic, as three and sometimes four bakers shaped the doughs into loaves, raising themselves upward on their tiptoes to better lean into their task. They were in their forties, compact in stature and sturdily built with huge upper bodies, the result of or maybe just what it takes to very quickly shape two large loaves of what were mostly stiff and compact grain-filled pieces of dough — one in each hand — into round loaves and often turning them into oblong loaves in just a few more strokes. There was little talk and no banter, but at the same time no orders being barked, in what seemed a very tight ship.

Farther along, in the oven room, perhaps the most nimble worker organized the timing of the baking with the precision of a dispatcher at an extremely busy subway hub, but with huge physical demands. For the first time, I saw dangerously hot hearths (oven floors) that could be pulled all the way out of the oven like drawers, to make loading easier, and onto them he could set a movable metal grid of 15 or 20 rectangles containing loaves to be baked in a block and then the partitions removed, revealing loaves whose sides were basically crustless. Four or more different doughs were baked at once, necessary when making 30 different kinds of bread, many of them in small numbers. The baguettes and croissants were nothing exceptional, but the seemingly endless variety of grain-filled loaves begged for more attention than I could afford in such a short visit. In an area next to the oven was a hose with a nozzle that is used to spray a layer of moisture over certain rye breads as they emerge from the oven; the water quickly dries to leave a brilliant glaze and a more supple crumb inside. When the saleswomen began to arrive around 5:00 in time for the 6:00 a.m. opening, each in turn smiled and said a melodious “Morgen!” though receiving little more than exhausted grunts from the bakers. By that time, so many rising loaves and cooling baked loaves filled the space that there was little room to move.

Arno Simon, the owner, arrived in the middle of all this, a study in serenity. He is tall and graying, with an easy smile that wrinkles his cropped moustache. His strong upper body makes it clear that he has always done his share of the heavy lifting. Simon told me that the bakery was a family business (he was born upstairs) begun by his father 60 years earlier. When he was young, he had never had the least thought of doing anything but becoming a baker; as he spoke, he kept touching the doughs, absentmindedly checking their texture and temperature. When we examined various baked loaves, he said, “Look at this!” not for my benefit but as if still expressing wonderment after so many years that great bread can so completely exceed the sum of its parts. I asked about the mention of “Best Bakery 2014” on their website, and grinning once again, he replied that it had been a reality series, one of those shows where customers nominate their favorite bakeries, which then fight their way to the top. There had been 72 competitors that year. The exposure provided the demand needed to produce a beautiful book of recipes, both home-baking and the recipes for it being relatively rare in Germany. On the other hand, he expressed a simple pleasure at providing bread to the local hospital, saying, “At least they’ll have one good thing to eat.” Because of our language difficulties, we would each try to break the awkward silences with a bit of silliness. At one point, he picked up the piece of sourdough culture that at 5:15 a.m. would be built with flour and water to restart the 24-hour process and said: “My little friend!” We laughed, but it was completely true.

 

When Andrew and I returned that evening at 6:00 to witness the third stage of the sour being mixed, Simon assured me that there was nothing particularly complicated about his in-house three-stage method, apart from being punctual about times and keeping an eye on things. Above all, he expressed no concern about the precise cast of indigenous microbiological characters that inhabit his dough. He was pleased we were there, because he had organized an after-hours casual meal with the family in the brightly colored, even more brightly lit 1980s-style shop. (Andrew and I never made it to a restaurant while we were in the area, but instead found ourselves eating Westphalian ham and other local specialties with pilsner beer from the Strate brewery in nearby Detmold.) By force of habit as a chef, I found myself trying to pair the more or less intensively flavored foods with darker- or lighter-colored rye breads only to remember that unlike the baguette, which is a subtle complement or palate cleanser, even the 70-percent rye seemed to be an equal partner in any match. Its flavor was rounded but assertive and possessed a tanginess seldom encountered in the US, but celebrated in Germany. The Swartbrot (black bread), containing a high percentage of different textured rye meals, was quite dense. In this company, the Weizenmischbrot (wheat with 30 percent rye) got lost in the shuffle, but with its dark and slightly crispy crust and supple crumb, it would be a shining example to North American artisans of the possibilities of deli rye. These were superb loaves.

The purpose of the meal was to meet the family, who had been thoughtful enough to invite a young woman from the neighborhood to translate. Simon’s wife, Sabine, was compact and ebullient and happily spoke a bit of French. Their daughter Marie-Thérèse is blond like her father but quiet, with his sweet smile. She runs the pastry department, a separate space in the back of the bakery producing typically German cream- and fruit-filled cakes, sold by the slice, as well as florentines, marzipan, and chocolates, and she seemed to be experimenting with cupcakes.

A family spirit fills the bakery. By the following day, the bakers were interrupting their activities to call us over when the pumpernickel was being checked for doneness, and it was touching to see them trying to juggle rigor and understanding in their exchanges with a mentally handicapped intern, a charming young man-boy with beautiful features, a vacuous gaze, and falsetto voice. When Simon dropped me off at the hotel at the end of the second day, there were hugs.

In Westphalia, Simon’s basic 70-percent rye loaf, baked in straight-sided rectangular pans, is called simply Graubrot (gray bread). The flour is Demeter-certified type 997, which corresponds to medium rye in the US. The desired amount is dispensed directly into the mixer from a silo upstairs. The third stage of the sour had been mixed early that morning and contained more inoculum — more of the previous built stage and less new flour and water — so as to create a shorter and more predictable window during which its activity would be at its maximum. I could only smile when I saw a small amount of beet syrup and 5 percent of soaked old bread being added. Simon said that they had always done so, but he also mentioned that the falling number of the flour was 225, which seemed to me a bit high. The water added to the dough brought the overall percentage to 80 percent of the flour by weight, leading to a texture slightly firmer than I had imagined.

The mixing was done at slow speed in an old-fashioned one-armed machine, typical of Germany, and lasted almost an hour, during which the slightly elastic flow of the dough increasingly manifested itself. The 30 percent of white flour (type 550), like a strong US all-purpose, was added toward the end in two increments, perhaps so that the long mix doesn’t break down the gluten network. The large percentage of sourdough means that 20 minutes’ bulk fermentation suffices, and the shaped loaves are ready for the oven in an hour. A few pieces of dough had been shaped and set to rise in oblong cane baskets and then baked free-form as in other parts of Germany — “for gourmets,” Simon said with that smile. They require the addition of lots of steam to the oven as they are introduced, moisture that condenses on the surface of the loaves to form an almost leathery protective layer that keeps the crust from fissuring with cracks like wounds from a dull knife. The fierce oven is then turned down, but as Brümmer reminded his readers, overbaking can exacerbate the dry crumb that results from high-falling-number flours. Once baked, the free-form loaves were placed on a rack and sprayed with the fine-nozzled hose until they appeared wet. The loaves must be oven-hot for the water to evaporate completely, but when it does a very shiny glaze appears on the mahogany crust. This softens what can often be a dryish crust in most rye breads, making it easier to slice, and helping the loaf to stay fresher longer. I was fond of the rectangular Graubrot, but the beautifully glazed free form loaf was indeed “for gourmets.”

 

The astonishing surprise during my visit to Arno Simon’s bakery was the pumpernickel. I knew I would find wonderful rye there but had few expectations from pumpernickel. The North American version is a puffy travesty for which a National Day of Bakers’ Shame should be created — false color from caramel (“blackjack,” bakers call it), sugary substances, additives, and almost everything (even dried onions) but rye and rye meal, which are little more than an afterthought. Home versions contain cocoa powder and espresso. And to the wheat-eater that I remain, imports from large German producers found in US fancy stores seem like an agglomeration of birdseed stuck together with a bit of flour and water. Simon’s pumpernickel loaves were completely new to me — dense but yielding in texture and very fragrant, with complex roasty flavors and notes of fruitcake.

The oldest pumpernickel bakery, Haverland in Soest, was founded in 1570 (and sold out of family hands in 2007). The word “pumpernickel” first appeared in print 100 years before that. A 2014 European Commission document aimed at guaranteeing the authenticity of Westfälischer Pumpernickel defines its geographical area and says that the bread must be made from 90 percent rye. The exact mix of coarse grains and finer-textured meals is left up to the producer, but coarse grains must be easily visible in the finished product. The document puts a positive spin on “previously baked” bread as an ingredient by saying it “has always been used,” stipulating it must be the bakery’s own pumpernickel. In addition to yeast and salt, both malt extract and beet syrup are permissible. Strangely, there’s no mention of sourdough, one way or the other. The thing that sets Westfälischer Pumpernickel apart from other rye loaves is that the pumpernickel must be baked at low temperatures for at least 16 hours. The document mentions not only caramelization but the Maillard reaction, a noncaramel browning that adds unique flavors to roasted foods.

The batch of pumpernickel that I watched Simon and Schmidt make at the bakery was enough for six large loaves, surely a labor of love. The dough contained grob schrot (coarse rye meal) with 20 percent soaked old bread, salt, and sourdough — no yeast. The mixing lasted for about an hour with a 20-minute rest in the middle. No bulk fermentation, but something over one hour of fermentation once in large rectangular metal molds. For baking, the molds are placed in a larger rectangular pan in a shallow water bath, covered, and baked at such a low temperature that the loaves were in fact more steamed than baked. The initial oven temperature of 160 degrees C (320 degrees F) had fallen to 100 degrees C (212 degrees F) by the time they were removed from the oven. I later learned that on weekends, greater availability of the oven allows him to extend the bake to 24 hours and in his view the difference is absolute.

To understand what set Simon’s pumpernickel apart from every other version I had tasted, I first had to realize that tradition and the European Commission’s codification of the process leave more leeway than a nonspecialist might think. The Westfälischer Pumpernickel formula in the whole-grains volume of Brotland Deutschland lists 80 percent coarse rye meal, 20 percent mid-size meal, and 3 percent old bread, but a recipe for Feiner Pumpernickel calls for 50 percent mid-size meal, 50 percent fine rye meal — so finer textures overall — and 10 percent old bread. The greater percentage of old bread there and Simon’s even greater one seemed key, a big lesson to someone who had their doubts about its use in other types of rye bread.

I had first contacted Thomas Gill in his role as chairman of the Association for the Protection of Westfälischer Pumpernickel, which was founded in 2010 by five producers and led to the 2014 guidelines. Gill’s day job is running Prünte, his family’s bakery in Gelsenkirchen, perhaps the smallest bakery with enough capacity to export. Prünte’s pumpernickel, which greatly resembles Simon’s, is made with a mixture of coarse, middle, and fine meal, but what Gill feels sets it apart is a relatively large proportion of “reworked bread” (a phrase he prefers to “old bread”), a baking time of 20 hours, and the absence of added syrups. (He would like the baking to last a full 24 hours to further deepen the flavor, but in the daily cycle he needs time to unload yesterday’s loaves and load today’s.) Gill allowed that his practices would be extremely difficult to replicate in a larger operation.

He’s a sixth-generation baker and may seem a traditionalist, but he’s forward-thinking and not particularly nostalgic. He mentioned that his bakery’s point of view on how to deal with changes in rye over the years was unconventional, but, citing “family secrets,” wouldn’t elaborate. He also mentioned that although sourdough is not required by the European Commission rules, it would still be permissible because it’s only rye and water that’s been fermented — but he’s against it. Fifty years ago, its use was inevitable because pumpernickel’s long, low-temperature baking made it the poster child for “starch attack” disasters linked to low falling numbers. He feels that now those stronger flavors would be unacceptable, and even worries that further changes in rye varieties and climate as well as the younger generation’s desire for sweetness might one day force him to turn to syrups. But for now, Prünte’s are remarkable loaves, and he hopes they’ll be distributed in the US in the near future.

I have long dreamt that rye, a hulking giant waiting just beyond the horizon, would be the next discovery by North American artisanal bakers. It wouldn’t take much for change to come; the possibilities are there. Some months ago, Randy George, who runs the excellent Red Hen Bakery in Vermont, contacted me, wanting to know if I still believed what I had told him about rye with low falling numbers — that contrary to common belief, they are beneficial to rye bread. He put me in touch with Todd Hardie, a grower in Greensboro, Vermont, whose very first harvest of rye, only last year, had falling numbers of 112. I went to see him and brought home samples, which I ground in a home mill. The flour was a bit too coarse, but the results were astonishing, In the beginning, the move to real rye bread might come from a combination of growers producing rye in cool climates, small local mills producing fresh flour, and bakers willing to take on those low falling numbers. As it often happens, over time the bigger outfits might follow. Starch attack be damned! ●

 

Here’s how to make your own rye bread.


From issue 99

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