Local rye, day 3

Hi! Don't worry. We haven't fallen asleep on the job. Or at least one of us hasn't. I can't speak for our littlest baker, who went down this morning for a nap at 9:07.

But if you're still with us, today, put that starter in the fridge. If you peek inside, there will be a lot of whey-like liquid on top, and a soggy flour mixture down below. That's normal. Here's what mine looks like:

While you've got the top off, go ahead and give it a whiff. Does it smell yeasty, and a lot like sourdough bread? Good. You're on the right track. We'll see you Friday for The Big Bake.

Local rye, day 1

Let's start a project. Ready? Ok. Take two cups of all-purpose flour, two cups of warm water, and a tablespoon of yeast. Shake them all together in an old yogurt container or a big Mason jar, put the lid on tight, and set them on the counter. Now walk away.

We'll be back with the next step on Wednesday. In the meantime, if you happen to have some local rye kicking around, say from a grain CSA, grind it into flour. You'll need that for what comes next—that, and some poppy seeds and caraway. See you then!

The Local Food Report: Rein's Real Rye

In 1973, Rein Ciarfella found the perfect loaf of rye bread. It was round, boule-shaped, with a thick, leathery crust and a chewy, toothsome crumb. It had a deep rye flavor with subtle undertones of caraway, and it was excellent plain, and with butter. Toasted alongside a bowl of soup, it took his breath away.

It was from a bakery in Guildford, England, just south of London, where Ciarfella was living at the time. He bought a loaf every day for two years, but then it came time to move home. When he came back to the states, he couldn't find a similar loaf of rye anywhere. He thought about the bread all the time—for thirty-five years, he thought about that bread—and finally, last May, he decided to do something about it.

He found a recipe online—a deli rye bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois—that he thought looked pretty similar. He played with the flour ratios—rye to all-purpose, even adding a little high-protein flour in, toyed with and abandoned a sourdough starter—in his attempt to get a loaf that was perfect. It took three months—three months of recipe testing and not-quite-up-to-snuff breads—but finally, he got it right.

When he did, he was ecstatic. He was so pleased with his bread, in fact, that he decided to start selling it, as a business: Rein's Real Rye. He bought a 20-quart Hobart mixer and two mini fridges and started mixing up big batches every few days. The bread he developed was a wet bread—one of those no-knead breads that develops its gluten through moisture and time, rather than the stretching action of your hands—and so he mixes it in the afternoon, then leaves it overnight in the fridge.

In the morning, he pulls out the dough to cloak it (a process that involves sprinkling the surface of the dough with flour and stretching it and tightening it in order to give it a strong crust and hold the moisture in), slash the top of it (this helps the loaf expand in the oven), and finally, place it on a cornmeal-covered stone to bake. Then, while it bakes, he uses an expertly jury-rigged steaming system that involves ice cubes in cast iron pans and a hand pump spray system. This helps the loaves get good oven spring, that final rounding rise that takes place in the oven.

It's a lot of work for each loaf, but after thirty-five years without a good rye, Ciarfella thinks it's worth it.

You can find Rein's Real Rye at the Sandwich Winter Farmers' Market, Cotuit Fresh Market, and Amber Waves Natural Foods in Falmouth.

NO-KNEAD RYE BREAD

Ciarfella sent me the link to this recipe, which is the recipe I mentioned above that he started his quest with. Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I did not make this recipe the way the author intended, but I do not care. It was WONDERFUL. The directions were somewhat confusing, but I think the original idea was to divide the dough up into four parts and bake one part per day over four days, keeping the other chunks in the fridge. I misunderstood that, though, and baked it all at once. It formed a massive country-style loaf, the kind you can buy at PB-Boulangerie & Bistro as a "Farmhouse Loaf," and it lasted us a week. It was fantastic.

3 cups lukewarm water
1 and 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 and 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 and 1/2 tablespoons caraway seeds, plus more for sprinkling
1 cup rye flour
5 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
cornmeal for sprinkling

Mix together the water, yeast, salt, and caraway seeds in a large bowl. Let sit five minutes. Whisk together the flours and mix them in until completely combined. Cover the bowl with a wet dishtowel and set aside to rise at room temperature for two hours.

Sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal. Form the dough into a ball and dump it out onto a floured surface. Roll the surface of the ball in flour so that it is very well coated on all sides. Transfer the ball to the prepared baking sheet and let it rest, uncovered, for about 45 minutes.

In the meantime, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Fill your oven's broiler tray with water and have it ready to place on the bottom shelf when it comes time to bake. Slash the top of your bread diagonally three or four times—making about 1-inch deep cuts—with a very sharp bread knife. Bake for roughly 30 minutes, refilling the steam tray as needed, until the crust is golden and sounds hollow when tapped.

Only to find

Life can be surprising sometimes—

On a weekday morning, the man you love—that same man who wakes up every day and runs 4.3 miles in 36 minutes at 6:37 and is gone by 8:15—that man can decide to stay in bed til noon with a headache.

And you can go to make him pancakes, only to find you're short all-purpose flour and throw in a bag of rye—rye you ground down from the whole berries grown in Belchertown, MA at White Oak Farm for your grain CSA—extra flour from another project, another morning, another sort of day.

And on this day, this morning, you can find that rye transforms: whole grain into airy pancakes, heavy with sweet syrup, delicate and lacy around the golden-brown edges, plump with berries that spill out, down, into an oily swill—butter, hot, thin maple. You can find that rye and buttermilk and blueberries are synonymous with delight.

Oh, and that headache. What? You can find it's pancakes and coffee and cider, and off to work another afternoon.

BUTTERMILK RYE PANCAKES
[with blueberries from Silverbrook Farms]

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole grain rye flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
4 tablespoons melted butter
2 teaspoons honey, stirred into the melted butter to warm
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Separate the eggs, cracking the whites into a medium mixing bowl and the yolks into a small one. Whisk the buttermilk into the whites, and the melted butter and honey into the yolks. Then whisk these two egg mixtures together. Pour the wet ingredients into the large mixing bowl with the dry ingredients, and use the whisk to gently mix the two until just combined.

Have the blueberries at the ready, along with a spoon. Warm up a large, black iron skillet over medium heat. Coat the skillet with several tablespoons of oil or melted butter and ladle several third-cup scoops of pancake batter in. Use the spoon to plop a few blueberries into the top of each pancake. Cook for several minutes, or until the bottom side feels crispy and cohesive under a spatula and the top batter starts to form tiny bubbles. Flip the pancakes with the spatula. Cook for another few minutes (this side will want slightly less time than the first side, as the blueberries can burn).

Serve the pancakes hot, with plenty of butter and real, warm maple syrup.

Go very quickly

Okay. We are just the tiniest bit short on time around here this week, so here's what we're going to do: I'm going to go back to Pro Tools and tax forms and sink scrubbing and sorting whites and darks, and you are going to do something much more fun. You are going to click over here, send Pete Wells a joyous, grinning, thankful cyber-kiss, and fire up your oven for a batch of these:

Oh, and you are going to get a jar of slightly sweet yellow mustard out. Then you are going to slide around your kitchen in your wool socks listening to Harvest Moon and doing a little jig, because you are going to be uncontainably, terrifically happy. This is one of the side effects of eating soft, salty homemade pretzels dipped in good mustard, at least in my experience.

I made these pretzels last week, with my mother, after she sent me the link to the New York Times recipe. We were up skiing for a few days in Maine, with Alex's family and my family and all sorts of cousins and nieces and plenty of beer and helmet hair and hot-tubbing. I had never come across a recipe for soft pretzels before, but if ever there was going to be a pretzel-y occasion, this seemed like it.

So I brought along some freshly ground rye flour from our grain CSA and some Maine honey and Raye's mustard and an ungodly amount of baking soda, and my mother and I put together a batch. We started after dinner, after bowls of chili and salad and homemade brownies, and we filled our tiny hotel kitchen with flour and butter and salt and stacks of carefully arranged baking sheets and teetering dishes and went to work. Between the rising and the boiling and the baking, the whole process took about three hours, which for an after dinner snack can be sort of a long time to wait. Luckily, we had a) already consumed at least twice the amount of food that any human could possibly require in a day, and b) were too busy enjoying live entertainment in the form of Alex's brother and cousin Joel playing guitar and his other cousin Sam singing every Neil Young song ever written to notice or care. About the time they made it to Unknown Legend (careful! there's noise), the pretzels were hot and soft and salty and we ate all but two right there on the spot. Alex's other brother declared them better than the ones at Bullwinkles, and we decided they were almost as much of a smash hit as Neil Young when he came out with Heart of Gold. (Again, watch out for the noise.)

I did not make a single tweak to the recipe, so when you get in to your kitchen, do just as Pete Wells says. The only words of caution I have are that thirty seconds of poaching go very quickly, so be prepared and have a baking sheet on hand and a timer and a spatula ready. Also, get some nice mustard. Heinz is fine, but it is no Down East Schooner.

Whatever you do, make these soon, and I'll see you when the laundry's done.