Having made a couple attempts at rye baking with middling success at best (tasted great but with lousy crumbs), and seeing a recommendation for this on the r/sourdough subreddit, I decided to educate myself.

Rye is a delicious and nutritious flour that is notoriously hard to work with. It has little gluten, so doughs with a high percentage of rye defy wheat-based techniques for building structure and a lighter crumb. Rye doughs are also sticky and thus difficult to handle.

Ginsberg ably explains all this and the various techniques for working with and baking rye doughs. A concise history and geography of rye and its baked products precedes this.

Where this book fell down for me was its narrow focus. Directions for the breads always use a mixer where at all possible – eschewing mixing and kneading by hand (to say nothing of folding instead of kneading). Baking always uses a pan of water to add steam, the term 'Dutch oven' appears exactly zero times. Really, who writes a book about baking, especially sourdough baking, and never even mentions Dutch ovens? Bizarre.

I feel like he copy-pasted the recipe instructions and while modifying them for the basics of the recipe, gave little thought to any idiosyncrasies such as dough slackness or when it might be better to use the aforementioned folds or a Dutch oven.

That said, the variety of recipes should satisfy everyone. They range from conventional loaves with a low-ish amount of rye (a third or so) that are more amenable to wheat-bread techniques to pure rye breads with multi-stage builds involving sponges and scalds taking two days to complete.

With a bit more care put into the recipe details, this would easily be a four-star reference-cookbook. ( )

Wow!I love this book.

Now, I am in general a cookbook fan... and if it's a tome on making historical and/or artisan breads, I am even more susceptible.

While I've started a rye sourdough (yet again), I've thus far only made 1 recipe from this book, but it's a winner! It's a quick yeast rye- completed in 4 hours or less from starting- the Breton Folded Rye. SO very quick and easy and delicious! The rye flavor really shines through, and it's light but has a nice fine crumb (we did let it rise twice the suggested time, but our kitchen is cool). Shaped differently, it would be great for sandwiches.

The others are more elaborate, but in varying degrees. For serious and aspiring to serious artisan bakers, the various lists and charts of bakers' percentages are a help to understanding what's going on in each phase.

Among them all, the recipes seem to use practically every form of rye possible. It is fortunate that there is an excellent list of sources for some of the less-common items.

Highly recommended for people interested in a variety of idiosyncratic Old and New World rye breads. ( )

I've been using Ken Forkish's book to make bread for about two years and was ready for a new challenge. But I was defeated by rye. I didn't like how the recipes were organized in this book - by region - rather than level of difficulty. And the types of flour required were so specialized, they weren't available for purchase locally. The medium rye, which is called for in the vast majority of the recipes was available from only two on line sources and cost + shipping put them out of the realm of possibility for regular use. While using Forkish's book, I experienced failure once (due to extreme user error). With these recipes, I never felt like any of the loaves I made was a true success. There were a couple places where the directions were vague and left me guessing, and others where measurements were inconsistent. After six months, I'm giving up. ( )