#41 -Wholegrain Sourdough Rye: Mastering The Basics
Why am I so obsessed with rye? It’s because I love it… Rye is just so special. – Alison
Where to begin with sourdough rye bread? This is a topic that both Alison and Andrea have received so many questions about. Alison is a rye sourdough bread expert – she has made hundreds of loaves over the span of years, and she has honed-in on a lot of the specific nuances and details of working with this amazing, delicious whole grain. In this episode, Alison breaks down some of her favorite reasons for using rye bread, and discusses her newly launched course – Rye Sourdough Bread: Mastering the Basics.
With this course, I wanted to explain everything about rye sourdough starter; explain why rye is so wonderful, explain how rye works, how it’s different from wheat. I wanted to walk people through two recipes that will enable them to understand rye, make it in their own kitchens, and, at the end of the course, be ready to start making the two loaves covered in the course or carry on experimenting with it. – Alison
Alison’s course is a work of love and dedication and the produce of many years of rye failures, retries, and eventually successes! You can download her course at www.ancestralkitchen.com/rye, and podcast listeners can use the code PODCAST15 to get 15% off!
Rye has a different type of gluten than wheat. A lot of people who have … sensitivities to gluten, may be able to eat rye. – Alison
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Bread is a fundamental – it’s a staple… It’s so portable, practical, flexible, calorie-dense. It provides a simple meal in such a glorious way. – Alison
The Run Down:
08:00 Rye Sourdough Bread
10:00 Benefit 1: Gluten Content
16:10 Benefit 2: Taste
17:40 Borodinsky Bread
20:57 Ageing Breads
24:41 Whole Grain/Wholemeal Rye Flour
Huh. What do I know? I don’t know how to eat soft eggs and I don’t know what pumpernickel flour is. – Andrea
29:47 A tease – upcoming episode with Elly of Elly’s Everyday Sourdough! You all asked for this topic!
30:30 Benefit 3: All About the Starter – and listen for the versatile ways Alison uses it!
36:10 Discard Uses
36:30 Alison’s Course at The Fermentation School
42:10 Benefit 4: Working the Rye Dough – advantages, time savers
48:38 Alison shares about her course and what it includes
Discount code! PODCAST15
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Resources:
20-minute documentary on: The Battle of Borodino – Napoleon’s Bloodiest Day
Alison’s Course – Rye Sourdough Bread: Mastering the Basics – use code PODCAST15 for 15% off!
At 28:45 Andrea referred to Alison sending out a fermented oat bake recipe over email – sign up for Alison’s e-mail list here to get wonderful ancestral updates dropped in your inbox (Alison and I talk multiple times a week over video, phone or Instagram and her email list is still how I get recipes from her! I definitely recommend getting on her list – it isn’t spammy or weird at all, it’s just like getting cozy hugs and REAL kitchen inspirations delivered from a kitchen comrade. – Andrea)
Previous Episode: #7 – Sourdough: Why We Love It
Previous Episode: #10 – Elly from Elly’s Everyday: Sourdough Baking (Patrons, check your private podcast feed for bonus content from Elly!)
Previous Episode: #26 – Bones & Water: The Magic of Stock
Organic Unsifted Whole Grain Rye Flour from Azure Standard (US only)
Thank you for listening – we’d love to continue the conversation.
Come find us on Instagram:
Andrea is at Farm and Hearth
Alison is at Ancestral Kitchen
Transcript:
Andrea:
This is a topic that both Allison and I have received so many questions on even before we started the podcast. Allison is a rye sourdough bread expert. She has made hundreds of loaves over the span of years, and she has really honed in on a lot of the specific nuances and details of working with this amazing, delicious whole grain. In this episode, Allison and I break down some of her favorite reasons for using rye bread, as well as discuss her newly launched course, Rye Sourdough Bread Mastering the Basics. And we also have a discount code for podcast listeners. Listen for that at the end of the episode or check the show notes. I can testify to the fact that Allison has put all her heart and soul into creating this incredible course for you guys, for the world, and her family has eaten a lot of rye along the way and they’ve told me about it and they love it. So let us know how you like the course and how you like this episode, but I think you are going to love it.
Alison:
Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast with Alison, a European town dweller in central Italy, and Andrea, living on a newly created family farm in northwest Washington State, USA. Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking and living with ancient ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.
Music:
Music
Andrea:
Hello, hello, Allison. How are you?
Alison:
Hello. I’m good. It feels like such a long time since we’ve recorded.
Andrea:
I know. It’s weird. I mean, we still talked, but we didn’t record, so I feel sort of…
Alison:
Yeah.
Andrea:
We had a coyote incident last night with coyotes just literally screaming and going crazy in the woods, and the dogs were going nuts, and Gary ended up walking out there just to see what was going on. But then they started again this morning about four right after I got up. I don’t know. It was weird. Anyway, so the kids were all kind of up and wondering what was going on. So,
Alison:
Um, yeah, but here.
Andrea:
We are nice cozy morning to record. And I’m really excited about what we’re recording today, Alison, because this is probably one of, if not the top question we get is about the subject. So it’s about time that we’re recording. But before we go into this delicious and decadent subject first i want to say welcome to all the listeners and welcome to the patrons who are sponsoring the podcast and bringing it to all of you um we actually have two new ones um at the time of this recording to say thank you to so that’s alex and reese and alex joined at the sponsorship level and reese is on the companionship level so thank you guys for choosing to sponsor this podcast we really appreciate it
Alison:
Thank you we are working on our first live chat for the patrons who are at the companionship level or above and I think it might have just happened um just as this podcast goes out which is an exciting development yeah I’m I’m excited about.
Andrea:
That is something that you and I had in mind from the very beginning that we wanted to do. So that’s pretty exciting. And, um, go ahead and, um, Reese can go in and check out that extra podcast that we have for you. So hopefully you find some good things in there.
Alison:
Yeah.
Andrea:
Um, Alison, did you eat before we got together?
Alison:
Yeah, I did. I did. I had ground beef or minced beef, depending on what part of the world you come from, mixed in the cast iron pan, a dish which is going in our forthcoming e-cookbook, which I cooked in home, rendered tallow with some onions and cabbage. And I used coriander and cumin and some garlic and a little bit of tomato paste and I had that with a mish mashed sourdough which was kind of all the flowers that were kind of left in the cupboard, some spelt, some whole grain spelt, some home milled barley and some rye that was whole grain and also some partially sieved rye and some chocolate barley malt that was whole so little grains of chocolate malted barley so I just threw it all together I’ve kind of taken to making my breads without weighing much when I’m in the mood you know I just put it all in a bowl and see how much water it takes and turned out lovely so I had a big thick slice of that with half of it, half of it had lard on it and half of it had butter on it because I couldn’t decide.
Andrea:
Oh, yeah, I like that. I like that.
Alison:
So yeah, it was delicious. How about your breakfast? Have you eaten or not?
Andrea:
It was weird because I got up two hours ago and I still haven’t eaten. But I got up because, well, it was because I’m so anxious about all this technology stuff that’s going on right now. So I was trying to make sure I had all my cords and I was just so focused on that. I didn’t even think about eating until I asked you if you ate. I was like, oh wait, I didn’t eat. But I did make myself.
Alison:
Okay, so we’re going to hear your stomach rumbling.
Andrea:
Yes, that’s not fun during the background, you guys. That’s just my stomach. But I did make myself a cup of coffee with a lot of our raw cream in it. So that’s a pretty complete breakfast, right? Protein and fat and everything.
Alison:
Yeah, that sounds lovely. That sounds lovely. I’ve got a review, which we’ve got two new reviews. And I thought I’d read one of them thank you guys this one’s from AB in WA and it was left on Apple podcast so thank you AB and it the title was Love Ancestral Kitchen and AB wrote educational and inspirational I never miss it oh man very succinct and very beautiful thank you very much it’s so lovely to see that there are a growing number of reviews up there and and hopefully that will bring us more and more listeners which we like so thank you very much if you’ve taken the time to leave us a review if you haven’t yet the um details are in the show notes as to how you can do that.
Andrea:
Thank you very much i love how lexi’s husband says on their podcast leave us your most honest five-star review and he said once and if you don’t have a five-star review, don’t say anything.
Alison:
Yeah.
Andrea:
Oh, that was funny. But no, it really actually makes a huge difference to these podcast apps when people review because podcast apps, I guess, assume if nobody’s reviewing it, nobody cares. But we care about our broth, people. Yeah. Care about our kitchens. So yeah, leave those reviews.
Alison:
Indeed.
Andrea:
When I get these awesome messages from people And I always think, oh man, I should have asked him, can you make that a review? I always forget. So thank you for leaving that review A, B. All right, Alison, are we ready? Is this it?
Alison:
Yeah, I think I am.
Andrea:
This is the day. Okay. Well, this is long awaited, long anticipated. And I have been listening to Alison talk about this all for a year. A long time. When we get together, she tells me, oh my goodness, we’ve been recording. Or whatever. So this is a long time coming, much anticipated. And finally, today is the day we get to talk about rye sourdough, mastering the basics.
Alison:
Indeed.
Andrea:
All right, Allison, first of all, I’m going to throw out there that we’re not going to cover everything rye sourdough in this episode. There’s literally not time. I mean, you just spent a year creating a resource. So there’s no way we can cover all that in one hour, but we can give a lot.
Alison:
You don’t want to know what’s in my brain about rye. That’s for sure. You’ve been here a very long time.
Andrea:
Even Rob, even when I talk to Rob, it’s always like, yeah, well, you know, we just had rye. We’re eating a lot of rye bread right now, like just rye is coming out of all your ears. But so there’s more than we can ever possibly cover in a podcast episode, but you can give us a good starter here and then point us in the right direction. I’m hoping. Please. Certainly. Help.
Alison:
Certainly.
Andrea:
Send help.
Alison:
Yeah. So when I thought about what I wanted to say in this episode, I thought, well, where did this kind of start? You know um why am I so obsessed with rye and and I think when I when I answer that question honestly it’s because I love it I mean I I haven’t used wheat in my kitchen since I started making sourdough I’ve I’ve not made wheat breads but rye is just so special and I try to delineate what I thought was so great about rye and put it into four reasons so I’m gonna hit you with four reasons that I love Ryan and Ryan is so wonderful.
Alison:
Exactly. I tried to make it succinct because there’s a lot to share, but I wanted to make it not overwhelming and clear to people. So the first thing that’s great about rye is its gluten content. So really, the reason why I started making rye is because of Rob, my husband.
Alison:
He had a wheat allergy or wheat intolerance, I would say. In it came clear in his early 20s when he was very very very ill and he got to the point where he literally could not even breathe in like the flour in a bakery for example without being extremely ill that’s how intolerant he was to eat and at that point that kind of triggered him to to look at his diet and completely change like the way he was living and he just gave up all grains at that point because he was very very ill and I think he kind of thought well I’m never going to be able to eat bread again you know and when we first got together neither of us was eating bread we went through various kind of ways of eating and we were on gaps for a while so we weren’t eating any grains at all and then when I came back to making sourdough just under a decade ago, it was clear that I couldn’t give Rob wheat. And I wanted to have spelt, which I love, but spelt’s very similar to wheat, whereas rye isn’t. And Rob had remembered in his past that he’d liked rye bread. And so we started, I started experimenting with rye in order that he could try it and see how he got on with it.
Alison:
And he found he could eat rye. He could eat it absolutely fine without any problems when I created it sourdough I don’t know about kind of standard yeasted rye breads he’s never been down that route.
Alison:
He absolutely loves rye. He loves the flavor of it. He loves the fact that he can eat it without getting ill. He loves the fact that it gives him a concentrated source of calories, you know, rather than just eating kind of cooked millet or something that isn’t so dense in calories. And he just loves the fact he can eat bread and it tastes so great. And rye does have gluten in it, but it has three times less gluten than wheat. So it’s much much less dense in gluten but also it has a different type of gluten to wheat so I think a lot of people who have problems with wheat it’s because of the certain type of protein makeup of the gluten that is dominant in wheat whereas rye has a different type of gluten so it may be that if you are sensitive to gluten it might just be that rye has the type of gluten that perhaps you don’t have so many problems with certainly that’s the case with rob and so i feel like you know reason one about why rice are such a useful type of bread for us to have in the world that we live in today is because it just doesn’t have that gluten issue that wheat does um at all and yet it makes a wonderful bread.
Andrea:
And we need bread, don’t we?
Alison:
Well, I think we do. I think, you know, bread is a fundamental, it’s a staple and it has been for, you know, tens of thousands of years, at least 10,000 years, if not more. And it’s so portable, it’s so practical, it’s so calorie dense, it’s so flexible, and it just it provides a simple meal in in such a glorious way without you having to think oh I’ve got to cook this I’ve got to cook I’ve got to cook that it’s just there and also you can take it out so you know when Rob goes into Florence and he needs to take some lunch with him because it’s going to be there all day well I make him a sandwich with rice sourdough bread and he takes it and it gives him enough energy until he gets back home and and he’s got dinner in the evening yeah and.
Andrea:
It’s so foundational to the beginning of every civilization and give us this day our daily bread you know it’s in like the most famous prayer and yeah companion like we have our companionship level called meaning with and pan being bread like your companion is the person you’re breaking bread with, it’s just, it’s part of our humanity, I guess. So I love this because so many, well, it’s just so many of us think exactly what you and Rob are doing. I just can’t have bread anymore.
Alison:
Yeah, exactly.
Andrea:
There’s a way out.
Alison:
Yeah, I feel really strongly about rye from this perspective because so many people think they have to have gluten-free bread if they don’t get on well with wheat, if wheat doesn’t sit very well in their stomach after they’ve eaten it. I did. It’s not necessarily the case. You know, give rye a try. It’s particularly sourd rye, you know, sourdough rye. It’s a world away from standard wheat bread. And it might mean that you can make nice bread and you can have a nice bread again without worrying about all the other ingredients and making something that’s gluten-free and getting flowers from here there and everywhere and all the additives you.
Andrea:
Know the kind of
Alison:
Powder starches and things that you have to put in yeah um so it it’s it’s been revelationary for rob completely revelationary if you changed his life if.
Andrea:
You don’t have celiacs as you and i and rob i don’t think either. I don’t think any of us do, but do struggle with wheat and things like that. There is something about the really old edition of grains that is so much more digestible and tolerable. Kind of like when I found raw milk and couldn’t handle regular milk, but raw milk and the fermented milks worked for me. Okay. So I have a question that I think is going to lead you into your next one um this is great everything you’re saying but is it how does it taste so number
Alison:
Two is taste yeah so that’s the other reason that I started making rye bread just because in the past before I before I um stopped grains and before I started long before I started making sourdough I used to buy rye bread from a shop and I absolutely loved them you know the deep heavy kind of Russian black breads the seeds inside the caraway the different spices there’s just such an amazing litany of delicious rye loaves a lot of them from the cultures that used rye and could grow it because often rye grows in places that we just can’t grow because it can grow under snow yeah it can grow you know different latitudes completely and those cultures often had to survive just as rye as their only grain and so they’ve come up with just amazing if you think about pumpernickel if you think about the danish breads like rugbrod you think about the the german breads there’s just there’s an amazing past of all these different flavors that bring out the flavour of the rye grain and also other things to incorporate it in them.
Alison:
And for me, I wanted to include that in the rye sourdough course that I’ve just been creating, as you said, over the last like six months. And my favourite kind of unusual rye bread is called Borodinsky, which is a Russian bread. Just sounds good. There are a ton of stories as to where the name comes from. There was a battle of Borodinsky in the Napoleonic Wars in, I think, 1912. Wow. and the the story that I like most about this bread is that the there were two trucks one was carrying rye and one was carrying caraway seeds and they both got hit in this battle and so the locals had these two things and they had to combine them and then they came up with this Borodinsky bread named it Borodinsky after the the battle that was happening Borodinsky is a.
Alison:
Um not only do you get the rich deep flavor of rye which is just there as part of the grain but it includes a scald which is heating a portion of the flour with hot water and then putting it into the dough and that makes an incredible sweetness and it’s combined with a little bit of malt and a little bit of toasted caraway and the flavors are just I have never tasted a rye bread like it or a bread like it it is it is incredible and it is an amazing bread and I wanted to include that in the course to show that you know not only can you make normal sandwich breads that you can slice and you know put cheese in and lettuce and take to lunch at work but you can also make breads that will blow your socks off with the the depth and richness and texture and flavors and yeah and it just other flours can’t give that I think it’s it’s more difficult to combine spices and other adjuncts with more wheat-based flowers whereas rye has kind of synergies with a lot of the the spices like you know aniseed and coriander and cumin and caraway and it.
Alison:
There, you know, there were recipes with sauerkraut, with orange, with all these other flavours. And it’s just, it just tastes amazing. And it doesn’t taste anything like wheat bread. It is, you know, to have an interesting palette to your flavours in a week or a day, to put rye bread in there gives you a completely different experience. And it brings me and Rob and Gabriel a lot of joy for sure.
Andrea:
This is like a rye commercial. I’m just like, I just want it now. I already knew I loved rye bread, but also I looked up the Battle of Borodino and guess what day that battle took place in 1812 on the old calendar?
Alison:
It was 1812.
Andrea:
August 26.
Alison:
I was a century out.
Andrea:
That’s three days from. Oh, you’re joking. Yeah, I’m not joking. Really? It’s three days from the date of recording.
Alison:
We’re recording on the 23rd. Yeah. That’s really freaking.
Andrea:
That is insane. Wow. No, you’re absolutely right, Alison. The depth of flavor you can get out of rye and other ancient grains just stuns me because I never knew, you know, oh, flour is supposed to have a taste. So do you age your breads?
Alison:
Yeah, that’s a good question because rye is kind of known for being able to age well. I think, in fact, it was the kind of desired bread for sea voyages because you could keep it and you could take it with you and it keeps much, much longer. Also, the flavours develop. So generally what people say is if you make a rye bread, you should not cut it for 24 hours. Ideally, you should not cut it for 48 hours. That is sometimes hard to do if you’re hungry.
Andrea:
I can imagine.
Alison:
But it carries on cooking for you know until it gets cold so for at least eight hours after you’ve taken it out of the oven it carries on cooking and then the flavors carry on developing in a way that just doesn’t happen with other grains and so we generally find we try to cut ours like a day or two days after we’ve made it and we will just leave it in our bread bin until that point and then over, a week’s period the flavor will get stronger and more intense it will change every day and by about day five day six it’s really rich and generally our lows will last about a week in you know the humidity and temperature that we’ve got here um so yeah we age them in that we don’t cut them for two days ideally and then we enjoy them for a whole week so rather than perhaps a wheat bread going either stale or moldy depending on your humidity probably more likely stale um the rye breads just don’t do that they they last much much longer and their flavor, increases and enhances over over a week for sure like.
Andrea:
Every good ferment
Alison:
And if.
Andrea:
You want to know about some of the other gut benefits of sourdoughs do check out our episode on sourdough um or on bread just an episode purely on bread and allison talks about you know yeah you’re fermenting this but then you’re cooking it, does it still have benefits to your gut? And yes, it does. So go check that out. Okay, so you talked about caraway and rye. Other flavors, other flours, anything else you mix with it?
Alison:
Yeah, often. I mean, I experiment with rye now. And I think, you know, once you’ve got the basics of rye down, you then are free to go and play with whatever you want to. So like I think I mentioned, you know, you can put citrus in. You can put any of those spices in. You can put sauerkraut in. You can put beer in. Yeah, exactly. Christmas life. You can put raisins and peels and all that kind of thing in. There are a myriad of different flavours that you can add to rye and that work really synergistically with rye. And I’ve just started to kind of experiment further with, you know, putting sauerkraut in, which is a fun thing to do, particularly if your sauerkraut’s flavoured. And I want to try putting some onions in a bread as well to kind of get that real kind of savoury caramelised flavour with the rye as well. Um really it’s um once you understand how rye works and how to work with it you can then go just you know crazy and do whatever whatever you want to whatever takes your fancy I think do you it’s fun do.
Andrea:
You think Humana’s gonna listen to this and then we’re gonna start seeing posts on Instagram for delicious rye loaves with all kinds of cool things mixed in I can’t wait I hope so I’ll bet you could put a whole cooked egg in the middle of one too like a hard-boiled egg and make one of those loaves with
Alison:
The egg in it and.
Andrea:
Slice. Okay, so you use 100% whole grain, and is that because of the flavor?
Alison:
Yeah. Um it’s kind of a bit the flavor um I do love the flavor of it because because it’s got all the bran in you get that depth of flavor of bran that is just is incomparable you can’t produce that flavor from a white rye bread I also use 100% rye whole grain rye because I think that, sieving flour is kind of it feels to me like an extra process on something and it requires extra energy and really by nature I sort of I swing towards the what’s the easiest and holiest way to do this and I also feel like it’s a waste you know when when we have this whole grain that we can grind up and use and it tastes so fabulous then why not use the whole grain why not learn to use the whole grain why not make your baking work with the whole grain particularly as it tastes so fabulous so why take it out why bother sieving it why throw it away let’s let’s use the whole of what’s there and get the benefits the nutrients from the bran as well as the nutrients from the white as well um it seems like a win-win for me to use 100% whole grain didn’t.
Andrea:
One of the ladies in Karima’s book say something about sometimes they sieved flour for some festival or something I’m trying to remember but some I’m I feel like somebody said that in there that but they didn’t do it much or she basically said the same thing I’m trying to remember if that was in that book
Alison:
Yeah, I think that sometimes, I have never used white rye flour. I just haven’t. Is it white? Mainly because the bread’s like, there is a white, yeah, completely. And Poland, Polish recipes use it a fair bit. I, first of all, I can’t get it very easily where I am. But secondly, it just, it feels like a kind of a shadow of the whole grain because the whole grain rye has so much flavor in it. And it just, the breads that I like the flavor of use the bran. And so I’ve just headed down that route because it seems to be, it ticks all the boxes for me.
Andrea:
You know, have you ever had orange juice with all the orange sieved out? It’s called water. Boring.
Alison:
It’s just an orange, like a colored water.
Andrea:
Are we going to do an episode with Ellie about grinding flour coming up?
Alison:
Is that? Yes, we are. We are. That’s going to come up in a few months. That would be really helpful.
Andrea:
Okay, so where do you get your flour? You said you can’t get white, but where do you get your whole grain?
Alison:
Yeah, so for me, I get my whole grain rye from mills in Italy. It’s grown in Italy, it’s milled in Italy, and I buy directly from the mill. And I kind of, if you can’t grind your own grain, I recommend buying your flour from a mill directly, rather than, you know, going and kind of hunting for it on some third-party place. In the uk um whole grain rye is sometimes called whole meal so i think in the states it’s called whole grain all the time in the uk and europe sometimes called whole meal um i have noticed though in the in the us that there are different kind of names for it so sometimes it’s just called whole rye flour sometimes it’s called whole grain rye flour sometimes it’s called dark rye flour, and sometimes I think King Arthur possibly call it pumpernickel flour because it’s a flour that people use for pumpernickel bread. Oh. Which can be a bit confusing. So the thing I would say is if you’re unsure. Yeah, yeah, pumpernickel bread. It’s a common term.
Andrea:
You hear it, you see it, pumpernickel bread, whatever, but I didn’t, I never, okay.
Alison:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. It’s traditionally, pumpernickel is cooked for like 24 hours in a bread, in an oven for like 50 C, I think, 50 centigrade. The traditional pumpernickel recipe is cooked literally for a whole day, which I will get to soon. Um yeah maybe not but i would say if you’re confused no not in the summer when when i need the heat so i should do it um and i do look at the descriptions what i did notice when i went searching for rye flowers in different geographies was that if you look in the description of the flower look for the terms unsifted or whole grain and go by that so for example the pumpernickel flour i saw it just says it’s unsifted it’s the whole grain and that’s what you’re looking for no sifting and the whole grain um ideally the flour would be organic because it’s the the best flour you can get will have the whole nutrients in and it will have respected the soil in the environment and stone ground stone ground flour retains more of its nutrients rather than roller, flour um and if you’ve got your own home grinder then you you can buy the berries and grind it yourself then you don’t have to worry about that you know you’ve got the whole grain because you’ve just seen it go through the machine which is really nice that.
Andrea:
Is nice and i told you my friend brenna who just bought a big farm in missouri shout out to brenna gave me a bunch of her organic baking goods and we eat the same things so that was awesome what a blessing but she gave me rye flakes. And I had never heard of that. And you suggested just fermenting it like in your oatmeal bake that you sent out on your email list the other day. You said try using it in that. Okay. So sourdough, sourdough, sourdough, but we need a starter. So maybe talk about that a little bit.
Alison:
Yeah. Yeah, of course. So… I think sourdough starters, I don’t know, they’re like some big wedge that stops people from making sourdough and they just shouldn’t be. I have a thing that I say quite a lot, which is you should manage your starter, your starter should not run your life. Because I hear from so many people who are like, I try to do this, try to do this, I’m looking after it, I’m doing it, I’m keeping it on the calendar. And they’re so confused and so despairing and they give up and then you know a year later they think oh I wish I’d done that yeah no.
Andrea:
You’re right that does
Alison:
Sourdough starters I remember when I started when I started making starters I read all the books from the library about sourdough baking and they all said different things about starters and I was just like what this person says this this person says that this person says and I tried making starters with various different flowers and I got in a muddle and it it wasn’t really until I found whole grain rye that I started to see the wood for the trees and find a way of making a starter that worked for me and still works for me I make my starters.
Alison:
For all of my breads with whole grain rye flour whether i’m making a bread out of rye or spelt or barley or even our gluten-free breads because we don’t need them to be gluten-free i make with a rye starter rye whole grain rye makes the most amazing easy to maintain starter why is that it’s it’s it’s for several reasons and firstly the the rye grain itself has so many microbes on it that it just is so much more alive than other grains that’s what i’ve found and that’s what you know i’ve read since making a success out of my rice starter it just it starts you don’t need any extra things in your starter a pineapple juice or any of these things that other people say sugar you don’t need any sauce like that you just put the rye whole grain rye flour in and i think because it has the bran which is kind of more on the outside it just is the host of many many more microbes that are ready to transform and make you a really kicking starter in addition whole grain rye takes up water in a very different way to wheat even whole grain wheat in that it it kind of soaks up And so instead of becoming a slurry.
Alison:
As often a wheat starter will, it becomes a paste.
Alison:
And because you’re able to keep it as a paste rather than more liquidy, it lasts longer. So you don’t have to keep attending to it every day.
Alison:
So with my whole grain rice sourdough starter, I mix it up and, you know, it’s started. It’s a starter. I put it in the fridge. I keep it in the fridge and I bake maybe once or twice a week.
Alison:
When I’m ready to bake, I take my starter out and I use some of it to make 11 overnight to make a bread the next day. And I keep doing that for maybe a week, 10 days. My starter’s still going. I haven’t done anything else to it. I haven’t refreshed it. I haven’t done anything to it. After about a week it either runs out or when I open it I think oh it’s starting to smell quite strong and I’ll just refresh it with some more whole grain rye flour and water and then I’ll put it back in the fridge and I forget about it and I think I attend to my starter I mean apart from making bread I worry about my starter I don’t know every 10 days perhaps I do something with it and and it just because it’s rye and because I’ve found you know a hydration of it that means it doesn’t need feeding all the time it just it works it’s incredible there’s none you know if you leave it in the fridge it doesn’t get that kind of hooch on the top that wheat starters can often get and then you’re worried should i throw that away what’s going on with it it very very rarely goes moldy i think i’ve let sometimes i’ve left it in the fridge for like six weeks it’s absolutely fine it just needs feeding again it’s an absolute marvel and anyone i mean i’ve been banging on about whole grain rye flour as a starter medium for years now because it it just works and it means that you can just keep a starter and you don’t need to worry about it.
Andrea:
And you use it for all your sourdoughs
Alison:
Yeah all my sourdoughs that’s great oh.
Andrea:
That’s awesome and good question you said every 10 days so probably not but do you have a specific day like oh every Sunday I feed it or do you just kind of do it as as you go okay
Alison:
Yeah no I’m not that organized usually what happens is it I spot it in the fridge and I think oh I haven’t looked in that for a few days and it’s that forgiving you know and and I’ll open it and I’ll smell it and I think oh it’s all right I’m a bit busy I can’t do it now it smells all right it can go another couple of days and I’ll just put it back on the shelf and then I’ll um I’ll think oh okay it was a couple of days ago i smelled that i should really refresh that today and i’ll get it out yeah and just get a new jar put some of the old stuff in put some flour and water and stir it put the lid back on put it in the fridge and.
Andrea:
Do you have discard recipes in your um i’ve even really said what the right course is but do you have discourse or discard yeah oh my gosh discard recipes in i can’t even talk
Alison:
Yeah so perhaps we should talk about the course Let’s talk about that. The last six months I’ve been working on a course which distills… A lot of the information that I’ve learned about rye um and it is up and available to purchase at the fermentation school we’ve got what’s it we’ll put give you all the details of it because we’ve got a special discount for podcast listeners as well and um with that course I wanted to explain everything about sourdough starter explain why rye is so wonderful explain how rye works how it’s different from wheat and i wanted to walk people through um two recipes yeah that will enable them to understand rye make it in their own kitchens and get going with it and so at the end of the course ready to either carry on making the two loaves because i absolutely love it or move on and start experimenting with with other rye recipes so back to the the question yes As well as the two, all of the other stuff in the course, there is a discard section because that’s the question that I get a lot. What can I do with my discard?
Alison:
And with the starter routine that I explain in the course, there’s some weeks I don’t have any discard because I’ve used all my discard when I’ve baked. But some weeks I’m busier and I haven’t made as many breads or I’ve got one in the freezer and so I don’t need to. And I end up thinking, oh, this starter needs refreshing and I’ve got a bit left to use.
Alison:
And my favorite ways of using my rye sourdough discard are in pancakes and in rye spice bread. And both of those recipes are in the course. I actually videoed making both of them, including the pancakes, because my pancakes don’t have any eggs in. I think people think you have to have eggs in pancakes and you don’t. Because Gabriel, my son, can’t eat eggs. But people do struggle with getting a pancake large enough to look like a pancake and also being able to turn it in a pan without it breaking. And so many people have asked me about that. How do you make these pancakes like eight inches across with no egg in and yet they look perfect? And so I filmed myself with the cast-iron pan showing how to you know how to what’s what the batter consistency should be how to put it in the pan how to know when to turn it and kind of just the things that I’ve learned over making thousands of sourdough pancakes to make them just look like a pancake without falling apart yeah so that recipe’s in there and also the um spice bread recipe again it’s filmed there’s a lot of video in the course, like over two hours worth of video on all of the recipes.
Andrea:
And you said you’ve been working on it.
Alison:
And the…
Andrea:
Oh, sorry.
Alison:
A long time.
Andrea:
Well, you said you’ve been working on the course for six months. I know, for six months. But in reality, you’ve been working on the course for years. You just did a lot of the bulk of the recording and writing for it and the art in the last six months. And so I think that’s one of the best advantages about this. When I was talking to Melissa Norris and she said, there’s so many people who want to write about something or give advice about something and they’ve been doing it for three months. But there’s a real value in a veteran who’s been doing something year over year over year and can tell you hey times and seasons different you know this is what happens that there’s and and there’s
Alison:
Not a lot of value is in all the failures yes yeah exactly because i have made i’ve made all of the mistakes you know i’ve messed up the pancakes hundreds of times not hundreds of times but a lot and i’ll learn and i’ve worked out how you know when the bread is ready to put in the oven and how you know when it’s too late and how you know when it’s too early and i’ve i’ve worked out how to mix the bread without getting it all over the place and what tools to use and yeah just all those mistakes and things that you when you’ve done things every single week and you know.
Andrea:
Exactly how it works and exactly how it
Alison:
Doesn’t know how to do that yeah.
Andrea:
And there’s not a
Alison:
Lot of that and in.
Andrea:
Courses and instagram things online there’s yeah there’s just all these people who are like oh yeah I’ve been homeschooling for six months here’s my advice and it’s like well I don’t know give me a mom who’s graduated
Alison:
Seven I think I think it’s really it’s really daunting to start something new yeah yeah and I remember feeling daunted at the beginning of making sourdough, and I remember the books from the library being useful to a point you know they all have pictures And that was good. But the video makes such a difference.
Andrea:
I agree. I agree.
Alison:
And that’s why I chose that medium. You know, I could have just written it up and done it as a book. Yeah. The video, it’s like, I want the people there with me in my kitchen. And that’s the best way I can do it. You can see in my bowl. I’ll tell you why I’m using this particular thing. And I’ll tell you all of this other stuff that has just come from 10 years of making it. And it’s like being in my kitchen with me. That’s what I want. Because you can look in the bowl.
Andrea:
I want to be in the kitchen with you. And I know you’ve probably got to try out your discard recipes a bit because Rob has said things like, well, I think we have seven loaves in the freezer. You know, like you just keep stacking up as you try all these things. Okay, so you just alluded to something that I know is your fourth and final point, but is not talked about much anywhere. And that was the mixing and getting it everywhere.
Alison:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is, as you said, this is my fourth kind of benefit, or I see as one of the biggest benefits of rye, in that you do not need to knead rye, and you do not have to do any of these particular shaping things. You know, you see people who kind of take the loaf, the wheat loaf, and they tuck this bit under and tuck that bit under and tuck it again, and they put it down on the side and they let it sit for 20 minutes, and somehow, magically, it stays the same shape. You’re like, how does that happen? Mine goes flat, you know? that’s.
Andrea:
Because it’s a
Alison:
Thousand percent glue you don’t have to do that you don’t have to do that with rye and that at the beginning when i started making sourdough that that was a daunting thing for me how am i going to shape these loaves and make them look like this and that and the other and when i realized that you don’t have to do that with rye i was like oh i can just make this bread and it feeds my husband and he loves the flavor of it and i love the flavor of it and i don’t have to worry about tightening the skin of it to make it this and i don’t have to sit there and knead it that felt like i was being let off the hook i was like yeah i’m in this i’m making this bread.
Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Let off the dough hook. Because rye works differently to wheat. Okay. And it means that when you’re making the bread, you just don’t need to, you don’t work it in the same way as rye, as wheat. So when you’re making wheat, you, wheat bread, you add the water to the wheat and you get the gluten, the two proteins, glidin and glutenin, that make gluten together. And with that the gluten enzymes change the gluten and make this kind of a a mesh in your bread and when you work the bread making wheat that develops the gluten so with wheat you have to knead or you fold you stretch and fold you do all these things which makes the gluten stronger and then that gluten forms like you know literally a net a mesh and the air bubbles are trapped inside that and that’s what gives your wheat bread rise and when you shape the bread you create this kind of a skin which then will burst through and give you the kind of the ears or the the cracks that um you see on wheat breads with rye it’s just completely different when you add water to rye flour um the pentasans which are the complex carbs in rye make a gel with that water.
Alison:
And then it’s that gel that traps the fermenting and cooking gases. And you don’t need to knead the bread to do anything to make that gel. The gel just happens when you mix water and rye together. And it doesn’t rise as much as a wheat bread rises.
Alison:
The gluten mesh network has more capability to trap air than the gel does in rye. But still the gel traps air and rye breads will rise and there are tricks to getting the rye bread to rise more um you know can you tell us the tricks yeah i go to lots lots of detail on that of course um and there are ways that it can go wrong because other things happen at the same time as that gel um is formed which can attack your crumb and mean that it breaks down um so there is some nuance to to watching it you know with a rye bread you you don’t have to need it and you don’t have to shape it but you do have to watch it and because there are signs that will tell you whether it’s being attacked or whether it’s ready to bake so you just need to use your eyes really you don’t have to use your arms so if you’ve got shoulders that are not very strong like mine you don’t have to worry about needing it if you’re worried about creating this skin and shaping it you don’t have to worry about it one of my breads in the course literally you spoon the dough out of the bowl into the tin and you push it down wow so that that’s it you don’t need to shape anything the other one the borodinsky bread you put water on your um surface you dump the dough out of.
Alison:
The bowl and you wet your hands and you just as if you were working with clay.
Alison:
You shape the bread into a kind of a bread-like shape to fit in your tin just.
Alison:
Using your hands as if it was clay there’s no tucking things under and you lift it up and you put it in the pan.
Alison:
And it’s just it’s an amazing thing because you don’t have to worry about needing it if you can’t manage it physically um you can even mix in a mixer i mean lots of people make my breads in mixers so you don’t have to be involved in in it with your hands at all I love using my hands though um I need hand strength for it not shoulder strength yeah um and you don’t need to shape and so the working is is my number four I think that, There’s much less kind of pressure on you, particularly if you’re a new sourdough baker, to feel like you’ve got to master all these skills. Because with rye, you don’t have to. There’s two there that you don’t have to master at all.
Andrea:
Yeah. And I’ve always got my eye out for recipes that you can make with a baby on the hip. And that sounds like one of them. Yeah. And it kind of reminds me of what we said in the broth episode where we were saying it’s not difficult. It’s just different maybe from what you’ve done before.
Alison:
Completely. And it’s understanding that difference. Yeah.
Andrea:
And I love that you break it down because I know just the discussions you and I have had peripherally about this course, just from those discussions I’ve learned so much. So I’m really just excited to take the course and learn all of that. Do you ever see, well, you don’t watch movies, but it always annoys me when I watch movies that are supposed to be set in the old days and they’re kneading bread and you’re like, that’s obviously modern wheat. There’s no way they would have had bread like that. Okay, so let’s actually talk about the course because we keep referencing it, but I don’t… I mean, you and I have been talking about this course, but I feel like we haven’t actually told the listeners about it. Yeah, I don’t know what’s in it. I feel like, what are they talking about?
Alison:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so… The course, you can actually go and have a look at it while you’re listening if you want to. So I’ve got a link, which is my website, www.ancestralkitchen.com forward slash rye. And that’s how you can go and have a look at the course. It will redirect to the Fermentation School, which is a fabulous women-owned and women-led, women-run fermentation school with courses online.
Andrea:
I love that.
Alison:
And the course will walk you through by the end of the course you’ll know all about rye you know all about its history all about the health benefits of it you’ll understand um why why breads are different to wheat how they actually work and how to make them the best that they can be you know get the most rise from them and understand how that rising works you’ll have created and be maintaining a rice sourdough starter that is easy and will not run your life then you’ll.
Alison:
Have two breads that you’ve mastered which will be an everyday rice sourdough which is a kind of a beginner’s loaf relatively simple in its techniques and that’s the one that you just scrape out of the bowl and put in your loaf tin it’s um cuttable sandwichable um really delicious and lasts a long time that’s a super simple loaf there’s then also this second loaf the borodinsky the russian rye loaf which will teach you another technique which is scalding because there’s a scald inside that and you’ll also toast some seeds some caraway seeds and some malt to go in it and that will kind of give you another window onto a different type of loaf different techniques different flavors and what’s possible with rye and then there’s many ways to use a sourdough discard including the pancakes and the spice bread that I talked about.
Alison:
Really, what I wanted to do with the course is either, you know, someone who has never made sourdough before could take this course, literally. It will walk them through everything they need to know if they have never, ever made a starter, never, ever made sourdough at all. It will take them through the whole thing. So if you’ve never made sourdough before and you love rye and you want to cook with rye and use it in your baking, then you could use this course and it would give you everything you need. If you’ve got someone who can’t handle wheat, and maybe you’ve made sourdough or you’re making sourdough, but you know someone who doesn’t do very well with wheat, this will bring rye into your kitchen and enable you to make breads for them. Also if you’ve if you love baking and you love rye this will just open the door of rye to you to the point where at the end you’ll be able to go off you know wherever you started from and explore all these other rye recipes bring rye into other flowers in your loaf if you if you want to but you’ll be i called it um rye sourdough bread mastering the basics that’s what the course is called because that’s where you’ll be at the end the basics of rye you will understand the chemistry you will understand practically how it works you will have seen those you will have made them and you’ll be ready to to move on and just do whatever you want to with Rye I love that um.
Alison:
I think we said at the beginning, I did say that there’s a discount, a 15% discount for anyone who’s listening to the podcast. So, if you go to ancestralkitchen.com forward slash Rye, you will be able to see the course and there’s a free, at least one free preview video on there that you can watch so you can see me talking. You can then um kind of break down and you’ll be able to see all the different modules in the course and all the different sort of chapters that are in there and which one’s a video and which one’s a text um so you before you um you know you think about potentially getting it you can see very clearly what you’re going to get good and then if you decide that you want to go ahead if you put the code podcast 15 so podcast is p-o-d-c-a-s-t all capitals and then one five all one kind of word together in at the checkout you will get 15 off my course um because i just feel like podcast listeners have been following this journey they’ve been listening to all the episodes they’ve been listening to me making rye bread and eating rye bread every single episode for the last six months and I’d like them to see what and and to start creating with rye in their kitchens because it’s just it’s a wonderful thing it’s a really wonderful grain and.
Andrea:
This is one of those things take the course you know learn it until it’s you know the way you know it like Allison knows it inside and out and then that’s your knowledge forever which you can pass on to your kids and your grandkids and everybody in your community it’s amazing I love But I’m really excited about it, Allison, because I’ve never done an exclusively rye loaf. I’ve done mixes, but never just rye. So this is going to be my initiation.
Alison:
This is perfect for you.
Andrea:
It is. It is. I mean, I’ve been making sourdough for years and I cannot wait to get into, you know, crack this code and get into this with you. So, so yeah, both for somebody who’s been doing sourdough for a while and for somebody who’s new to it. I love that we can all. Join you in the kitchen and I feel like I need a documentary on just the technology side of you guys doing this without all the modern equipment and how you pulled that off was pretty remarkable gosh yeah
Alison:
That was that was challenging but but I did it and it feels like um it’s nice I like standing in a kitchen and and mixing and talking and oh yeah knowing that you know people are people who want it people who want it are gonna are gonna get something from it are gonna start baking rye because of it it feels like a really i get pleasure from it it’s a nice thing to do well the patrons.
Andrea:
Already have a few videos of you remember when you and i got together i think two times last year and we cooked on zoom together um yeah so patrons can see how you do it when there’s somebody cutting down a tree outside your window but
Alison:
Yeah luckily that didn’t happen but but um yeah i did it slightly differently in this course in that i am i got a camera above my bowl as well sometimes i’m sitting talking and showing things at the table but other times i have i managed to get the camera directly above my bowl so all you see is my hands and the bowl working which is so much nicer i’m really excited about this to really see yeah awesome.
Andrea:
Well this is such a good introduction to rye and the course i this is the hero the world needs the course is going to be amazing amazing thank you I really
Alison:
Want that and I hope that you know for anyone who’s interested in Raya I hope I’ve tried to explain in the last I don’t know it’d be nearly an hour I think yeah um why Raya is so good and and the particular kind of benefits of it to um to to filling gaps in knowledge because it it’s really an unsung hero Raya it’s not it should have more press It should be more out there because it’s a wonderful grain. And I know that, you know, some people listening contact me and they’re breaking with Rye already and they know how good it is. And I wish more people knew.
Andrea:
And it’s definitely one of those things where I get a lot of these really complex questions from people and I’m just like, I don’t know. You know, like I’ve been doing this for, you know, this and this way. And I’m just like, I have no idea. But you, all those dud loaves that you guys went through to figure out those little details on the proofing and everything is going to be excellent. So ancestralkitchen.com forward slash Rye and use the code PODCAST15, all caps, to get your listener discount. We’re so grateful to you guys listening to the podcast. All right, Alison, anything else?
Alison:
Thank you ever so much, Andrea. Thank you for your lovely questions. No, no, I think that’s it. Thank you for answering them. From my end, for sure.
Andrea:
All right well until next
Alison:
Time I’m gonna go off and um eat some rye probably I wish.
Andrea:
Soon after I take the course
Alison:
I’ll speak to you soon bye bye, thank you so much for listening we’d love to continue the conversation come find us on instagram andrea’s at farm and hearth and allison’s at ancestral underscore Until next time.
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