Rye Bread / Dialing in the Recipe Ongoing :)

I have been making bread DIY from scratch at home lately, mainly using flour, water, salt & yeast in different ratios, cooked at 480 F or 270 C inside an enameled dutch oven with lid for 15-45 min. Lately I have been mixing rye flour with regular flour, adding caraway seeds & making rye bread DIY.

I start by mixing just less than 3/4 cup water heated for 30 sec in the microwave inside a glass measuring cup to around 104 F or 40 C. I mix 3 tablespoons of regular molasses into the water, then add 1 tsp or about 4 grams of active SAF dry yeast that I keep I the fridge when not used. 

I then add about half the flour (1 cup, half rye flour, half regular flour) to this mixture & let the yeast start eating the sugars, which causes bubbles to form in the poolish wet dough similar to cake batter in consistency. 

Once this mix active in about 15 minutes I mix in the rest of the rye flour & regular four (1 more cup) to make a dough ball in a large glass bowl. This bowl placed on the warming part of our electric stovetop which is pulsed on & off for 3 min at a time to keep the bowl & dough around 80 F or 27 C / I let this dough rise for 1 hour, while the bowl covered with a wet towel to keep the dough from drying out! 

I then add 1 tablespoon almond oil

1 rounded 1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon caraway seeds

Mixing everything into the dough & then folding & kneading it into a boule. I let this boule rise again while I preheat a dutch oven to 480 F then bake / 30 min was too long, so today we are going to try 25 min. 

Breaking bread, making bread, all of it was inspired by my faith in Christ Jesus & God! After I started having a relationship with God after going to the Be In Health retreat in Georgia, I had this strong inner desire to bake real boule bread using flour, water, salt & yeast & made 10 different loaves like this to tune my recipe. The crunch toasted crust my favorite part! 

Extension

Bread making simple & practice for millennia since ancient times, long before yeast were discovered by biologists with light microscopes during the high renaissance when glass optics enabled the creation of telescopes & microscopes enabling people to see further out into space & further down into the microscopic world of sub mm viewing to look at bacteria & yeast. It was not until the interaction of the electron microscope that 1 nm features of the atomic structure of certain materials was able to be imaged & visualized for human analysis.

In beer making yeast was the mysterious ingredient missing from the original German beer purity law, barely, hops & water, later to include brewing yeast, the same kind of yeast that vintner's utilize in wine making :) Yeast converts carbohydrates into simple sugars, ethanol, CO2 & many other substances as they convert water & flour mixtures into risen bread dough, folded & kneaded into loaves baked in heat ovens until a crust forms & the water balance in the crumb reaches an equilibrium as the loaf cools after baking. Baking both an art & and a science, especially in modern mass produced bread with a 1 month shelf life that is impermeable to applications of jam, butter, mayonnaise, mustard or other food stuffs like hummus smeared onto sandwich breads :) There is a cultural expression "better than sliced bread" referencing the widespread commercial sales of pre-sliced bread in Bag's as America won the west & developed into an industrial powerhouse during the 19th, 20th & 21st centuries :) 

America's economy peaked in the middle 1960's as NASA sent human astronauts to Earth's moon in rovers with cameras to document the astonishing feat of applied technology & science :) Praise be to God! I chamber by Glock with 9mm Ammo with reverent respect & and a sense of divine duty to God & my country to protect other people at all times & to never give up. I am the spiritual descendant of Teutonic knights & will never give up, never give in, and will keep going trying to make a bigger positive difference in life until my body dies & my soul moves on to bigger & better aspects of reality that are at the edge of quantum mechanical physics ability to describe mysterious & spooky aspects of reality not able to be described in classical newtonian physics, since quantum effects often break the rules, and I am a rule breaker, ball breaker, way makers, driven & passionate & unleashed by the power of the Holy Spirit & faith in God through my lord & savior Christ Jesus. Beer & wine & bread came to us in modern times by way of monks of my faith in the Middle Ages, when water was unsanitary & everyone drank weak beer all the time until coffee took over as the stimulating beverage of choice for the 3rd & now 4th & emerging 5th industrial revolutions respectively.