I have been working on a very good bread machine rye bread recipe for a year or so now. I have one now that is worth sharing. Before the recipe here is a short lecture.
We all are experiencing higher and higher prices along with outs in our local grocery store. How long do you think it will hit bread and rolls too? Maybe it has already happened.
Back in 2017 I bought a Hamilton Beach bread machine. I played with it now and then and typically brought a loaf of bread, still warm, to parties we were invited too. It basically took up space on my small counter space. Then the 2020 pandemic came along.
I knew that things were going to go south in March 2020, so I drove down to the Philly area and picked up my mom and ankle bitter to hang out up here at the redoubt during the drama. Then it came down,
The Lockdown.
The Lockdown didn't affect us really at all but bread. My mom always had a slice of toasted rye bread every morning and a sandwich for lunch. MrsMac is a juvey diabetic and needs carbs so she uses bread at breakfast and at lunch.
MrsMac and I decided to basically hunker down and not visit any store that was open because my 88-year old mom was with us. Hence the bread machine was dusted off and put to work.
I made rolls, bread of course (White, Rye, wheat), and played with making cinnamon/raisin bread along with onion, etc. You get the idea. To be honest, what ever I turned out was a treat.
One of the best things about the bread machine was that you could just throw in the ingredients and the machine would knead and cook the bread. Or if you were so inclined, throw the ingredients into the machine and it would knead the dough and then stop it before its last rise. Pull the dough out and do what you will with it. Rolls cooked in the oven. Hard crusty bread cooked on a pizza stone free formed rather than in a pan and a cup of ice thrown on the bottom of the stove to create steam for the crust Ala French made bread. Yum!
The only challenge was bread machine yeast. If you run out there are other free formed yeasts like sourdough but it is a challenge. Luckily, I keep two bottles of bread machine in the root cellar and one that I am currently using in the fridge.
My bread machine also has a feature that I can put the ingredients in the bread machine before I go to bed and a timer starts the process at what ever time I set it for. How about 0300 hrs. in the morning for a fresh hot loaf of bread when we get out of bead.
What are you waiting for? There is about ten loafs of bread in a 5-lb bag of flour which costs you $1.99 on sale. A little bit of shortening and yeast and you can make 2-lb loafs of bread for about 25-cents a loaf. Just
bread food for thought.
This is the rye bread recipe I have developed over time that even my mom approved of.
Put into bread machine in this order...
> 1 1/2 Cups room temperature warm water
> 2 tsp of salt. I use 1 tsp of table salt and 1 tsp of sea salt. I am sure it doesn't matter.
> 2 Tbsps. sugar. I use 1 Tbsp.. brown sugar packed and 1 Tbsp. dark molasses.
> 1 1/3 Tbsp. olive oil. You can use any oil by the way.
> 2 Tbsps. caraway seeds - Optional.
> 2 3/4 cups all purpose flour. Bread flour is fine but the finished product will be more fine.
> 1 3/4 Cups rye flour
> 2 tsps. bread machine yeast.
Then start the machine cycle 1 and walk away for three hours.
At this point if you feel industrious, start using cycle 8 mode (My machine) and it will do all the mixing and kneading and stop before the cooking process happens. Once mixed and kneaded (Approx. 90-minutes), pull the dough and place on a pizza stone, punch down, cover with a dish towel, and place in a warm corner till the dough rises twice the size. About 40-minutes. Then put dough/pizza stone into a 450-degree pre heated oven. Reduce heat to 400-degrees and throw into the bottom of the oven a glass of ice. Close door and cook for about 45-minutes. You can tell when done when you can hear a hollow sound when you hold the loaf in your gloved hand and rap on the bottom. If no hollow sound put back into the oven for another 5 to 10-minutes.
If you haven't purchased your own bread machine by the end of this post, ya' ain't human!
