With the holidays around the corner it means lots of parties to attend! With a lot of parties to attend, that means a bunch of excuses to bake bread! To kick off this bread baking spree I decided to go with a simple rye sourdough.

Schedule: I based this loaf off of my sourdough schedule.

Since this is a 100% naturally leavened bread, I created a levain with my sourdough starter that was last fed 12 hours prior. This levain provides enough for 2 loaves of bread.

30 minutes before mixing the salt into the dough, I performed an autolyse by mixing the water, levain and flour together.

Ingredients:

Levain

Started at 8:20am with the following ingredients. Mix everything together and loosely cover and let it ferment for about 8 hours.

• 22g unfed sourdough starter (last feeding was 12 hours prior)
• 108g filtered water @ 85-90’F
• 108g bread flour

Dough

• 800g bread flour
• 90g dark rye flour
• 680g filtered water @ 90-95’F
• 216g levain
• 22g sea salt

Method:

After mixing the dough, I performed 3 stretch and folds within the first 3 hours. The dough fermented at room temperature (around 68’F) overnight. After the overnight fermentation I divided the dough and shaped them before proofing in bannetons for about 2 hours. The smaller loaf was fully proofed 20 minutes before the larger loaf was ready, so I staggered their baking.

I baked the loaves in a preheated dutch oven at 450’F for 38 minutes covered, then removed the lid of the dutch oven and baked for an additional 16 minutes.

Result:

As I’ve said before, this sourdough culture works extremely well. There are absolutely no issues getting it to ferment and the oven rise is amazing. The smell is very nice with a slight sour twang and the taste has just the right amount of tartness.

My Baking Notes

• Ambient Temperature @ levain start: 69’F
• Levain start: 8:20am
• Ambient Temperature @ autolyse: 70’F
• Started autolyse @ 6:00pm
• Water temp: 94’F
• Dough was 86’F at autolyse
• Mixed @ 6:30pm
• Dough was 81’F after mixing
• 3 stretch and folds in first 3 hours
• Started proof @ 6:00am
• Preheated oven @ 7:30am
• Small loaf into oven @ 8:15am
• Large loaf into oven @ 8:25am