Rye Bread

Yesterday I made two loaves of Japanese Milk Bread. The recipe calls for making two loaves but I’ve almost always made three smaller loaves and they work better for us. Yesterday I was also making rye bread and since I mostly use the wall oven, I can only bake three loaves in there at once and I didn’t want to keep the oven on long enough to bake two different runs of bread so I went ahead and made just two loaves of the Japanese Milk Bread.

Chad, Nicole and Addie were coming by for dinner. I had planned to have reubens because I wanted them to try the homemade corned beef. Chad and Addie won’t eat sauerkraut so I wasn’t sure if they were going to want BLTs or if they would eat just a corned beef and cheese sandwich on rye so that’s why I made the white bread too. Plus, we were almost out of white bread. Chad and Addie had reubens without the kraut but Chad and Vince ended up splitting half of my sandwich I didn’t eat. It had kraut on it and Chad said it was fine.

I’ve never been 100% pleased with my homemade rye bread but yesterday, the bread was perfect. It was the best I’ve ever made and so much better than what we’ve been buying. I kinda loosely followed this recipe but I used hard white wheat that I mill and rye berries that I mill. I don’t sift it . . just use the whole wheat – bran and all. Since the home milled flour absorbs quite a bit more water than does storebought flour, I added probably 3/4 cup extra water. The recipe is “no knead” but it takes a good bit of kneading for home milled flour to develop the gluten to make a good loaf of bread. I kneaded by hand (because I love it). Then when I got the ball into the bowl, I thought it still looked a little dry so I added a bit more water and kinda mashed the dough around with my fist. When I did the final shaping and put it into the pan, it was a sticky, damp dough – just what it needs to be when fresh milled flour is involved.

It truly was close to perfect in my opinion. The texture was great. The crust was great and it was so tasty. I hope I can duplicate it since I kinda went off on my own and didn’t really follow the recipe very closely.

I also baked a peach cobbler since we had peaches to use. We had Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream so that made a tasty dessert.

I sent home one of the loaves of white bread with Chad and Nicole so, I should be able to bake more bread in a few days. I love baking bread!