Rye Bread Recipe

A deli-style rye: a mixed rye-and-wheat pan loaf with an earthy, faintly sour depth and the unmistakable savory note of caraway. This is the bread for pastrami and corned beef, for a sharp cheese and mustard, for anything that wants a loaf with more character than plain wheat. The crumb is close and a little dense by design — rye does not build the airy structure wheat does, which is exactly why it tastes the way it does.

The default blend is 70% bread flour to 30% rye, the American light-deli style, with caraway at a restrained 0.5%. Rye is the reason hydration runs high at 75%: rye flour carries a lot of bran and pentosans that drink water aggressively, so a rye dough that looks correctly hydrated for wheat would bake out dry and tight. The bread flour in the blend is not a compromise — it supplies the gluten backbone that lets the loaf rise at all, since rye has very little gluten of its own. That is also why this bakes in a pan: a high-rye dough is too slack and low-structure to hold a free-form shape.

Expect a stickier, tackier dough than an all-wheat bread, and do not chase a smooth windowpane — rye will not give you one. Mix until cohesive, proof until risen but not collapsing (rye over-proofs into a gummy crumb fast), and cool completely before slicing so the crumb sets.

Pushing the rye proportion higher — 50% and up, toward a true German country rye — changes the game entirely: those loaves need a rye-sour starter for both flavor and the acidity that keeps the crumb from going gummy, and they behave differently enough to be their own recipe rather than a dial on this one.