Rye

Rye, together with barley, wheat and oats, has been among the most important grains of Europe and the Middle East since all those can be used in making bread and beer – which have both been existing in the human diet for several thousands of years.

As well as buckwheat, rye has been valued especially in northern areas – in the local moist and cold climate where soil is poor and acid, rye grows better than other cereals. Due to its resistance, rye can be grown even at the Arctic Circle and at the attitude up to 4000 meters above the sea level! No wonder that rye had been, up to the 20th century, the most common bread grain used by poor in northern Europe.

Rye contains a combination of unusual carbohydrates and proteins, which leads to very distinctive kinds of bread. Thanks to a carbohydrate called pentosans, which is known for the property of absorbing large amounts of water, rye flour can absorb up to eight times more water than wheat flour – thanks to this fact, rye bread is far thicker and moister than bread baked with wheat. Moreover, pentosans in rye, unlike starch, doesn’t get hard after baking and cooling and therefore its shelflife lasts for weeks!

Protein molecules in rye can’t link up end-to-end into long chains and form an elastic network like gluten, therefore most recipes of rye bread baked today are based on a combination of rye and wheat flour – rye giving it’s distinctive taste and wheat providing gluten for better rising of the bread.

Nowadays, we can find recipes using rye especially in Scandinavia, Poland, Germany and Russia. It is typically used in so-called Polar bread, Danish rye bread or the dark brown German pumpernickel.