The Wry Baker

The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg
along with the starters for a loaf of Polish Mountain rye bread.

The newest bread book in our collection is titled The Rye Baker, and I'm excited because Len is about to try a number of new recipes for a variety of rye breads. OK, he's not a wry baker, but I like the idea of one.

The Rye Baker offers a variety of interesting and useful information, including maps and histories of European countries that have rye bread traditions, detailed explanations of the biochemistry of making bread with rye flour, descriptions of the several types of rye flour and other ingredients, and of course a number of recipes for rye breads from many lands.

The first recipe that Len made is called Mountain Rye (Chleb Owsiany Górski), which is from Poland. It’s made with a sour rye culture, rye flour, and oats. It’s listed as “a typical southern Polish rye that uses an oat scald to produce a moist, tender crumb, while white rye flour contributes mildly spicy flavor notes.” (The Rye Baker, p. 295-297)

Ready to take out of the oven!

Trying a variety of rye breads is a wonderful way to get in touch with earlier times and other cultures. As it happens, rye is also a beneficial grain crop for modern farmers who are trying to mitigate the ecological damage that intensive wheat, corn and soybean cultivation causes. According to Tom Philpott's book Perilous Bounty (which I posted about yesterday) the typical situation in the farm fields of the 21st century is "a vast carpet of corn and soybeans taken away in the fall, prepping the ground for spring erosion events." However, he points out:  "adding rye to the corn-soybean rotation is a powerful antidote to the ravages of squandered soil and fouled water that’s eating away at the Corn Belt. Cover crops are an effective strategy for protecting the soil and building up organic matter, but as I saw in my sojourn through the countryside, they remain vanishingly rare. In the winter of 2017-18, they covered just 3 percent of Iowa’s farm acres." 

Rye crops survive even a very cold winter—which is why rye bread dominates the bakeries in Eastern and Northern Europe, and not so much in the Mediterranean basin, and why winter rye works in the American wheat and corn belt. “When it’s grown in Iowa these days, rye typically serves as a cover crop: farmers plant it after the corn-soybean harvest and apply herbicides to kill it in the spring without harvesting the grains, before planting the next round of cash crops.”

Many farmers don't kill the rye with herbicide; instead, they harvest it as a cash crop, for human or for animal consumption. Successful production of rye flour for making bread or of rye suitable for beer-brewing requires dealing with the danger of ergot mould, which can grow on the heads of the rye under some conditions. Methods of avoiding ergot in crops are in development, including the use of ergot-resistant strains of rye.  

A mourning dove nest found in a cover-crop
of rye and oats. Lexington, Illinois, 2017. (source)

The most exciting bonus of winter rye cultivation is that rye fields -- unlike wheat, corn, and soybean fields -- are friendly to wild birds! The sterile rows of wheat or corn or soybeans one sees in vast fields throughout the Midwest provide no cover for birds to hide or to nest. These fields offer no insects for birds to eat because of extensive pesticide use. Philpott notes: "to keep the great bulk of the Midwest essentially bare from the fall harvest to the early-summer establishment of corn and soybean crops gives birds no place to be. More winter rye, which requires little or no insecticides, could help." 

Note: Quotations above are from Perilous Bounty, pp. 150-154. 

Several other sources document the success of birds' nesting in cover crops like rye. They report research in various parts of the US and Europe that demonstrates how birdlife improves in fields that are not bare in winter:

“Fields with cover crops are not going to replace natural habitats, but in early spring there can be miles of fields with little vegetation. The advent of cover crops provides a potentially important habitat for birds returning to the Midwest from areas as far south as Argentina. The large green fields are likely a beacon for migratory birds.” (source)

This post © 2020 mae sander.