I was pressed for time, but wanted to try making Light Rye Bread. The answer was the bread machine. I had a place to start that made a bit more than I thought my bread machine could handle. I scaled it back so that it would make a loaf that was about 1 1/2 pounds. With a 2 pound bread machine I figured it would be a safe size. (When the recipe makes too much and the pan overflows it’s a big mess.)

Using the bread machine also meant that I needed less than 20 minutes to get the machine started. Then after 3 hours I could get the finished loaf out of the machine.

Here are the ingredients in the bread machine pan, ready to go. The yeast and the caraway seeds are on the top of the other ingredients. Here are the ingredients, in the order I added them to the pan:

• Molasses 15 grams
• Olive Oil 21 grams
• Water, room temp. 227 grams
• Rye Flour 124 grams
• Bread Flour 278 grams
• Salt 8 grams
• Instant Yeast 4 grams
• Caraway Seeds 3.5 grams

As the bread machine started I wondered if it was going to collect all the ingredients into the ball of dough. It did, and then it started swinging the dough around. I don’t think that there was enough dough to be kneaded very well. There wasn’t enough dough for the paddle to push it through the gap between the pan and the paddle, it just seemed to go around in circles without much resistance. I should have probably scaled the batch to be a bit larger for better kneading.

This photo shows that there was plenty of room and I could have made a larger loaf without overflowing the pan.

The loaf out of the pan and on the cooling rack. It looks good.

When you make bread in a bread machine the bread usually comes out of the pan with no problems. There are two ways that it can do it, with the paddle and without the paddle.

It is preferable for it to come out with the paddle. There are 2 reasons it’s preferable. The pan is easier to clean if you don’t need to soak it so the bread that oozed under the paddle and glued it to the shaft softens up to let you pull the paddle loose. The hole in the loaf where the paddle was is much smaller if you carefully remove it from the bottom of the loaf. If the paddle stays in the pan the hole if the loaf where it tears out when the loaf leaves the pan is much bigger and messier.

Looking at the bottom of the cooling loaf in this photo the paddle is visible where it rests in the bottom center of the loaf. Be sure to remove it before you slice the bread. You can damage both the edge of your knife and the paddle if you try to slice the paddle.

 

 

These two photos show the hole left by the paddle. On the left is the Light Rye loaf. On the right is shown the bottom of the Oatmeal loaf from Cornmeal Molasses Bread – part 1, where the paddle stuck in the pan when the loaf was removed.

Here’s another look at the partially sliced loaf. It sliced nicely, and toasted nicely, but it didn’t seem like it was fully baked. I wish now that I had checked the internal temperature when I took it out of the bread machine, but it didn’t occur to me then. I thought that this was enough of a success to try it again without using the bread machine. I will also leave out the caraway seeds. I thought I’d put more in next time, but my wife said she thought there was too much. So next time no caraway.