Rye Bread Made Easy with Richard Bertinet

In this lesson I want to teach you how to work with different flour. So we'll be working a lot with white flour, strong bread flour, but now I want to show you that every flour has got this different character and they behave differently and your fingers will feel always different when you touch different grains, different flours. So this one we'll use is rye flour. Rye flour is, when I used to work in a bakery, I always thought, oh I don't like it, it's really sticky. So it's a different way of handling it, so you don't get that same stretching at all. It's more like a very thick batter, so I mix it by hand but you can make that bread very exciting. We're going to do a composition of white flour and rye flour together and we're going to add some fruits, some caraway seeds and a bit of coffee in there as well and make some beautiful rye bread. The flavour of those three, I'll talk to you a bit more about it after. So to make the rye bread we're going to make a ferment, which is a blend of rye flour, water and a tiny bit of yeast. We're going to mix it together and leave it overnight to do its job and we'll make some dough tomorrow morning. So here we are. So you can see already the colour of the rye flour, it's much darker. This dark rye flour, you get light rye flour sometimes, it's a bit lighter. The dark rye's got that nice, you can see how crumbly it is. So what I'm going to do is get my fresh yeast in here, mix it with a bit of flour and rub it in together, that's it, and then put our warm water into the flour. And look at the colour already, typical of rye, a greyish amazing colour. So it's mixed properly, you can see it's like a very thick paste but there's no stretching at all, that's all, just there, see, doesn't fall off. I'm going to leave this now at room temperature or ambient, overnight, covered, and then we can make some rye bread with this. Now it's time to make the rye bread. So the ferment, as you saw yesterday, that thick paste has been resting for 12 hours and now I'm going to just show you what it looks like. So here we go, so you can see that spongy effect, you can see those air pockets inside, that's fermentation, and that smells beautiful, very earthy, the rye. So let's have a look closely at what it looks like. So see that, because there's very little gluten in there, it doesn't stretch, but you get a nice kind of spongy, fermenty, lovely, lovely smell coming from there. Slightly beery, slightly big stout beer, really, really nice. So my ferment is in there, what I'm going to do is soften the ferment with my water, so I put warm water into my bowl, lovely. So in here I've got all my ingredients ready, so my rye flour and white flour, the two together are ready, my salt is in here, and I've got fresh yeast in here. But let's start with the ferment first, I'm going to use a spoon for this one, it's much easier to mix with. If you use a mixer, use a paddle on the mixer, not a dough hook, and blend everything together, so we dissolve that ferment, which makes it much easier when we add the flour to it, like a very, very thick porridge. So next we add the flour, so actually before I do that, I'm going to blend the flour together so it's well mixed in, and I'm going to put the yeast as well, so it's much easier to do it. So again, the yeast as usual, bit of flour, rub it in, in my hands, done. And I'm going to pour this over the top. Our salt, add the salt scatter everywhere, and then we just blend everything together. Okay, so use a wooden spoon, I mean I hate sticky hands, so putting my hand in there is not my kind of pleasure, but if you use a wooden spoon, you can see how it makes, and very quickly, it gets together. So work it hard, and what we're looking for is really blending everything really, really well together. A bit of beating, but don't expect to have a dough stretch at all, you can see it's breaking all the time, so that's completely normal. And then work with your legs, lift the dough up, you can see that structure, sweet, plop. So now I'm going to add the sultanas into it, so I got some good sultanas, you can use sultanas, you can raisin, you can use any food you like, apricot if you want to, it's probably up to you. I love sultanas, the sweetness of it, this bread goes well with cheese, with salmon, terrine, pate, goes very, very well. You can use prunes also. Some caraway seeds, caraway, amazing spice, bring the flavor of the rye. So I put about a good teaspoon of caraway, and my secret ingredient is coffee. Now good ground coffee goes very well with it. After a couple of days, the flavor of the coffee infuse into it, so if you don't tell anybody there's coffee in there, it's very hard to guess. When you know it's in there, you can really taste it. I use it like a spice, it's amazing. So coffee everywhere, and then scatter all the fruits on the top, blend everything. Look at this, so that's ready now, everything is mixed properly. The good thing also with this, there's no resting time. We're going to put it into little tins straight away and let them prove by themselves. So let me show you that. I love little tins, they're really cute, and then they bake very fast also, about 30 minutes baking, but you can just make quite a few of them, offer them to your friends, but usually you eat 10 of them very quickly too. So we use the little tins, and this will make about 10 little ones out. Of course, you can get a big basket, make a big one, loose, you can just choose what you want to do. And each one will be about 140 grams. So we're going to weigh this, so I got my scales. But of course, if I just take the dough like that and put it into a tin, it will stick everywhere. So we're going to put some rye flour on it and dump this on the top of it, and just use my scraper to weigh 150 grams. Just roll it in a tiny bit of flour. I want that flour to cover the top of the loaf, it will look very nice at the end. And then put them into the tin. So my tins first, this is rye flour there, just a bit of flour on each one. And then we're going to put some flour on the table, that should do. And I use my scraper. I know my hands are going to get sticky now. I remember in the bakery, nobody wanted to do the rye bread because we knew how sticky it was. It's good. Drop a bit more flour on the top. There's no need to do any work to it, you don't have to faff around with it. Just use a scraper, a bit of flour on your scale, everywhere. And then cut some little lumps. You'd be amazed how heavy it is. You don't see, only 40 grams is massive. This is pretty, that's 175 there. So you see, it doesn't take much dough to do the weight. A little bit less, that's good. And the only thing you do with this is just a gentle roll it. That's all there is. There's no top, no bottom, it doesn't matter. Put a bit of flour around it, and then turn it into the tin. That's all. In Brittany, where I come from, we used to make rye bread, 100% rye bread, in a massive big basket. They used to prove for hours and hours and hours, a sour version, very sour, beautiful taste, but very dense texture. That bread will last two or three weeks all the time. It's amazing, amazing bread. I read a story, the Roquefort cheese was started, the mold in the Roquefort cheese and some blue cheese, made from a rye bread, which is partly baked and put in a cave. So the mold in a cave grows on the bread and they use that mold to go into the cheese. So it's very, very fertile flour. The last one. So now we're going to cover them, put them on the side, let them prove for about an hour, an hour and a half. Again, depending on how warm your kitchen is. So it's time to bake our rye bread now. So look at it. Do you remember when we put them, they were flat with the tin? So now they're just risen quite nicely. So let's have a look. Look at those babies. Beautiful. Nice, nice, nice. So I'm going to put them in the oven now. We're going to start at 230, quite high temperature, steam with it, and then we turn down the oven after five minutes to 210 to bake them. Let's go. So a good steam in my oven, 230, then we turn it down after that. Look at this, little rye bread, steaming hot from the oven. So what I'm going to do is recap quickly what we've done. And then after one or two minutes, I can just take them off the tin a little bit to let them dry. If you leave them in the tin, what happens? They get a bit soggy and there's condensation forming. So I just want to let them dry a little bit. So what we've learned with this lesson is using a different flour, very sticky, the rye, dark rye, but full of flavor, packed with the sultanas, coffee, and caraway seeds. So the smell is just incredible. We make small tiny loaves with this, but of course you can make larger loaves. And they take about 30 minutes in the oven. So when we put it in the oven, we put steam with it, good steam, and we bake them for five minutes at 230. And then we'll drop the oven down to 210 for the rest of the time. So check your oven because every oven is slightly different. We use fan oven. So if you're static oven, you might be a bit different, but that's what you're looking for. You don't want them to be too, too dark. Just smell glorious. The good thing with this, after a couple of days, the flavor infuse even more. So you can really get the coffee flavor mixing with the rye. So I hope you enjoy this. I do. Et voila, a little rye bread, or pain de seigle as we say in France.