As of yesterday, I am now maintaining two starters. The first is the starter I have been using since the beginning of this blog. The new one is a rye starter.
To make the rye starter I took 20 grams of the original starter and mixed in 80 grams of water and 80 grams of whole grain rye from Hodgson Mills (I have no affiliation with them).
What prompted this was a comment from my wife that we have a corned beef in the fridge that is approaching its use by/freeze by date and what are we going to do with it. My answer, of course is to cook it and make reubens. They require rye bread and when I made the rye bread a few weeks ago I thought I should try a rye starter to make rye bread so here we are.
So far, this is turning out to be an amazingly thick, dry starter. At the end of day one it is like a thick, dry porridge. Not quite what I expected.
This rye flour absorbs a lot of water. I sort of knew that from the bread recipe that calls for 83% hydration.
I’ll have to see when I make the dough but I may need to add extra water to compensate for how dry the starter is. We will see in 5 days.
The corned beef will also be interesting as the plan is to cook it sous vide for 10 hours at 180F. We have not cooked one sous vide before so that too will be interesting.
As far as the rye starter we will see if I decide to continue to maintain it after this week. It will depend on how the bread turns out. I have also recently learned about a company that sells starters from around the world. These include France, Italy, several middle eastern countries and of most interest to me Russia. That is a rye starter that is supposed to be good for making one of my favorite breads, Russian black bread. We’ll see where all this leads me.