"Jack Allen" <tippy1@comcast.net> wrote:
>I know nothing of bread baking. But I would like to make a crusty
>rye sourdough in my ABM. Can someone please advise me?
You are asking for 3 impossible things. The red queen only had to
believe in impossible things, you are trying to do them.
Sadly, sourdough and bread machines are not a good match. Baker's
yeast is very consistent. Sourdough is not. The bread machine
expects that a certain number of hours after you press the start
button, it will be time to bake bread. The bread machine can't tell
if your bread has risen, if it is sitting like a rock at the bottom
of the bread pan, if it has risen and collapsed, or if it has over
risen and overflowed the bread pan and filled the outer
container. All it knows is that it is 4 hours and 35 minutes have
elapsed, With yeast, you can get consistency. With sourdough, it is
not easy to get consistency.
Some people add yeast to sourdough to try to increase the consistency
of the sourdough process. The downside to this is that it doesn't
give the sourdough enough time to develop its flavor. Yeast greatly
dilutes the effect of sourdough.
Rye is another matter altogether. If you make a bread with
all-purpose or bread flour, when the bread has risen to a peak you
have about an hour of tolerance. Time when you can hold the bread
before you bake it. Breads with a lot of rye in them have about 6
minutes of tolerance. Rye has very poor gluten in it, and as a
result when it hits a peak, it starts declining pretty quickly. This
is, yet again, a poor match for a bread machine.
Finally, bread machines have trouble with crisp crusts. The dough is
encased in a pan, and the pan holds in moisture. And the moisture
causes crusts to degrade. If you get the bread out of the pan very
quickly, you can get a decent crust. If you hold the bread in the
pan, you are in trouble.
The best approach here would be to use the bread machine as a
mixer. Put the ingredients in the bread machine, let it mix the
dough, and then pull the dough out of the bread pan, form a loaf, and
then let the loaf rise and bake it. Doughs with lots of rye in them
are often best handled with a single rise.
There are many great resources online with regards to sourdough, so
you might look around a bit.
Hope this helps,
Mike
Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
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