Week 7 Bake: The dough you cannot stretch

The week 7 bench session — a 60% rye built on a warm sour, mixed for four minutes, smoothed into a tin with a wet hand and left uncut for two days

5 April 2027

Rye has gluten proteins and cannot make gluten. That single fact undoes most of what you have been doing since week 1: nothing to knead, no windowpane to look for, no dough to shape. What holds a rye loaf up is a gel. What stops the flour’s own enzymes from eating that gel in the oven is acid, and that is why this week’s sour is structural rather than a matter of taste.

Before the session#

Build the sour 12 to 16 hours before you come in, and build it warm: 180 g wholemeal rye flour, 180 g water at 35 °C, 18 g of your wheat starter. Your starter is the seed here, not the sour. It carries the culture across; the rye and the warmth decide what that culture does.

Warmth is the part people skip. You have been keeping your starter near 24 °C since week 6 because that balances acetic and lactic acid nicely in a wheat levain. A rye sour wants 26–28 °C, because you are not after balance — you are after a pH near 4.3 before the dough goes anywhere near an oven. An oven with the light on, an esky with a jar of hot water in it, or the top of the fridge if your kitchen runs warm.

It will not dome. It looks like porridge with holes in it, and it is ready when the surface has risen and just begun to sink in the middle. Week 6 drilled you to catch a levain before it sank, because a sunken levain has spent its gas. Here the gas was never the job. Let it sink and take the acid. Taste it: sharp enough to make you pull a face is right, and mildly tangy means two more hours or two more degrees.

Decide your rye percentage before you arrive. The bench formula is 60% rye and 40% bread flour, which is the middle of the range and the one to take if this is your first. A 30% rye behaves almost like the loaves you already know and is worth doing if you want a comparison; a 100% wholegrain Vollkornbrot uses this same method with more water, a longer ferment and a bake measured in hours. Buy wholemeal rye flour, not a bagged “rye blend”, which is mostly wheat and will teach you nothing.

Read the week 7 lecture first. The bench work is four minutes of mixing and a lot of waiting, and the waiting only makes sense if you know what the acid is doing.

In the session#

Three hours, and almost none of it is handling.

Half the rye and 180 g of the water are already in your sour, so the final mix is the sour plus 180 g rye, 240 g bread flour, 300 g water at 40 °C and 12 g salt.

Mix, four minutes. Wet a spatula or wet one hand and work everything together until no dry flour is left and the paste is uniform. Then stop. There is no network to develop, so time past homogeneous buys nothing; it warms the dough and it tempts you to correct the stickiness with flour, which is how a rye ends up short of the water its pentosans need. Aim for 28–30 °C out of the bowl. At 80% hydration this will look and behave like thick wet plaster, and that is correct. Every year someone tips it onto the bench and kneads it. It tears into sticky rags, picks up half the bench flour, and there is no way back — there was never a network to break, only a gel to wreck.

Bulk, 45 minutes at 28 °C. Covered, undisturbed, no folds. It will not double and you should not wait for it to. You are looking for a surface that has domed slightly and lost its wet sheen.

Into the tin. Grease a 900 g tin — the same tin as week 1, taking about 1090 g this time against that loaf’s 840 g piece, because a rye rises perhaps a third and has to start nearer the top. Scrape the whole mass in with a wet spatula, push it into the corners, and smooth the top with a wet hand until it is as flat as icing. You are filling a tin, not shaping a loaf — surface tension does nothing for you here. Dust the top with rye flour.

Proof, 45 to 75 minutes at 28 °C. The dusted surface is your gauge. Fine cracks opening across it mean the gas underneath has expanded as far as the gel will let it, and that is the moment to bake. Wide gaping fissures and a domed centre mean you are late; the loaf will sink into a dense band along the base in the oven.

Bake, 250 °C with steam for 15 minutes, then vent and drop to 190 °C for another 45 to 60. The long tail at lower heat is the point. A rye crumb is dense and wet, it sets from the outside in, and the starch needs sustained heat to finish gelatinising all the way to the middle. Pull it at 96–98 °C in the centre. A 2 kg Vollkornbrot wants three hours, most of it under 160 °C, and a pumpernickel sits at 120 °C overnight — which is where that near-black crumb comes from, not from anything added to it.

Afterwards#

Do not cut it. Twenty-four hours is the minimum and 48 is better, and this is the rule this class breaks every year. The crumb is still setting as it cools: the starch gel is retrograding and binding water that is currently free, and until that finishes the loaf is a wet paste with a crust on it. Cut one at two hours and it smears down the blade in a grey band, closes up behind the knife, and there is nothing left to assess. Cool it out of the tin on a rack, then wrap it in a tea towel once it is properly cold — plastic on a warm rye softens the crust for nothing.

Slice it thin, 5 to 8 mm, with a long serrated knife. Rye is eaten in thin slices because that is the thickness the crumb reads well at, not out of restraint.

Log the sour the way week 6 had you write feeds — three numbers, 1:10:10, double the largest ratio that week gave you — along with its temperature and hours. Then dough temperature out of the bowl, the time from tin to first cracks, the total bake, and the hour you finally cut it. Photograph the crumb. The gummy, unset centre that bake-off 2 marks you down for looks identical whether it came from a weak sour or an impatient knife, and your log is the only thing that tells the two apart.