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STEP TWO

½ cup fine whole wheat flour, about (70–80 g)

¼ cup water (60 ml)

1 ½ teaspoons active dry yeast (5 g)

6 cups water (1 ½ l)

2 tablespoons Starter (30 ml)

6 ¼ cups rye flour (800 g), finely ground

1 pound wheat berries (whole grains) (450 g)

1 ½ tablespoons salt (25 g)

2 generous tablespoons each, ground caraway seeds and ground coriander

6 ⅔ cups rye flour (850 g)

Step one: Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and add enough flour to make a soft dough. Keep in a loosely covered glass or clay container at about 85°F, 15 to 24 hours. Do not let the dough dry out.

Step two: Mix the additional flour and warm water into the first starter, making a firmer dough this time. Cover and let ferment until it has doubled or tripled and looks spongy. This takes about 5 hours at 85°F or about 24 hours at 70°F.

You now have a starter that can be stored in the refrigerator for several months; keep in a tightly covered jar that is not more than three-fourths full.

PRELIMINARY DOUGH

Prepare the evening before baking day.

Dissolve the yeast in a cup or so of the water at 110°F. Stir in the starter, then alternately another 2 ¼ cups warm water and the rye flour. Let the mixture stand 12 to 14 hours at room temperature.

Rinse the wheat berries in warm water. Bring 2 ¾ cup water to a boil. Turn off the heat, add the wheat berries, and let them sit overnight. By morning the berries should have burst open; if they don’t, bring them to a boil again and cook until they burst. Let them cool to warm-room temperature.

MAIN DOUGH

Stir the salt into the wheat mixture.

Mix the ground seeds into the rye flour. Pour half of this mixture into the preliminary dough and stir in the wheat berries. Work in the remaining flour, adding more water if necessary. Cover with a platter or plastic sheet and let the dough rise for about three hours in a warm place, until it is soft and quite spongy.

NOTE: If you grind your own rye flour, the seeds can be ground along with the rye berries—or grind them in the blender if you can’t find them already ground. Coriander is hard to grind fine: a light toasting beforehand helps a lot.

When the dough is ready to shape, grease the casserole or whatever pans you are going to use. Dust them with sifted bran or sesame seeds.

Press the dough into the pans, smoothing the surface with a wet spoon. Cover the pans and let the bread rise for 1 to 2 hours until small rifts appear in the top. Place covered breads on the lowest shelf of a cold oven and bake 1 hour at 425°F, then 2 hours at 215°F. Remove the covers or foil and bake another hour (longer in clay!), again at 425°F.

If you bake in three normal pans covered with aluminum foil and your oven is reliable, you can follow our baking timings with confidence. But if you use a covered casserole, especially a clay one that is soaked in water before baking, or one with wider dimensions, more baking time will be required. If you have a scale and want to be really sure when the bread is done, you can weigh the loaves both before and after baking. The bread will lose 12 percent of its weight in baking, so, for example, if your loaf weighs 3 pounds 4 ounces before baking, it will be done when it weighs 2 pounds 14 ounces.

Let the baked loaves cool on cake racks for half an hour to an hour; turn them out of the forms, and let them rest two days in a cool, airy place before slicing. Slice very, very thin.

Making Sourdough Ryes

Manuel’s Rye Sour

With its genius for fermentation, rye makes a super sourdough starter, much better both for rye and for wheat sourdough breads than any wheat starter we have come across (except, of course, desem, if you can count that as sour). This sort of starter is added for flavor and for its conditioning effect rather than to leaven the dough—yeast does that—so the sour is easy to store and maintain. No doubt it passes through stages when it has plenty of leavening power, but none of our recipes depends on that.

This recipe came to us from master whole-foods baker