For my holiday break, I decided to do a little project to learn how to bake with ancient grains. I read an article and got to wondering how it tasted, so!
This turned out to be SO INTERESTING.
First of all, rye turned out to be an ENTIRE rabbit hole. First you have to figure out which KIND of rye flour you want (there are four kinds!). And then you have to relearn how to make dough because rye basically has no gluten in it. (For a given value of ‘gluten.’ It’s close enough to be bad for celiac, but if you have regular-flavor gluten sensitivity, rye may be for you!.)
Anyway the answer re: the dough was: just dump it in with the water and yeast, mix it a bit and let it sit overnight.
Another thing I learned about rye: Just look for German or Jewish rye bread recipes. Don’t even waste your time on anything else.
(Seriously, I found a pumpernickel ‘recipe’ that called for 4 cups of flour and 6 CUPS OF BUTTER. I don’t know what that makes but it’s not bread. Some kind of sculptural material, maybe.)
I also tried spelt bread, which was less of a departure. Spelt is an older form of wheat (along with einkorn, emmer and some others). It still behaves mostly like modern flour, but the gluten is more fragile and there’s just generally less of it, so you have to be gentler with the kneading. Easiest thing to do, again, turned out to be giving it a minimal amount of kneading and then letting it rise in the fridge overnight. It tasted fantastic. Like whole wheat bread except more mellow and delicate.
Spelt is also good for gluten sensitivity. It turns out modern wheat since the 1940s is just way overbred on the gluten content. It’s not actually that gluten sensitivity is more common. We’re simply shoving so much more gluten into ourselves from modern flour (like double the amount in the same serving of bread?) that we’re hitting our tolerance limits.
The other thing I learned, from the MOST PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, is that modern flour is the SINGLE REASON nobody in the US can manage to eat enough fiber anymore. We all assume it must be less vegetables, lower quality of produce, everybody 100 years ago had the time and money to sit around eating salads, etc.
NO. The answer is just modern flour. Between the modern hybrid wheat varieties and modern milling methods, it destroyed the amount of fiber in bread.
Believe me. One slice was like 20% of my recommended fiber intake. Two slices a day for a week or two and my digestive tract rewired itself.