makes 2 medium loaves
No too long ago there was an era, I am told, when the bread known as Jewish rye was available in bakeries and delis all over New York City. Old-timers often refer to it as “corn bread” or “corn rye,” although it contains no corn whatsoever. I think they’re using the word “corn” the way it’s used in the British Isles, as a synonym for grain or wheat. Whatever you call it, if you search from Staten Island to the northernmost reaches of the Bronx, you’re unlikely to find a rye that measures up to the old-time version. To fulfill those expectations, it must have a chewy crust and a tangy crumb with enough acidity to cut through the fattiness of a pile of steaming pastrami. In addition, it must be dense enough to keep the mustard and coleslaw from seeping through the bread and getting all over your fingers.
Peter Shelsky is a friend who sells the most wonderful smoked salmon and pickled herring, and when he heard that I was on a bread quest for traditional sourdough rye, he gave us a seeded loaf from Orwashers, a renowned bakery on the Upper East Side. As we walked from his store, we tasted the bread, which contained lots of caraway seeds, that invariably inserted themselves between the teeth. The crumb was a bit dry and somewhat astringent. The bread was good, but not great.
Another friend recommended a bakery in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, which is home to an influx of Orthodox Jews in recent decades, but we found nothing to write home about in the rye bread department. Next, a hot tip sent us out to a bakery in Midwood, which, because of the density of Jewish grandmas, is sometimes known as Deepest Chicken Soup Land. The neighborhood looked promising. We watched a couple of rabbis stroll down the street, deep in debate, waving their hands as they as they spoke. Behind them, three ladies in bright hijabs (Arab headscarves) walked and talked in similarly animated dialogue. They paused in front of a small restaurant named Garden of Eat-In, which must have seemed like a clever name when the owners thought it up. Across the street, a Walgreens displayed the Hebrew word for drugstore, and on the corner a line formed behind the counter of a nondescript pizzeria with no pretension to modern gourmet standards. No coal-fired anything, just an old gas oven, with an even older man working meticulously behind the counter. Opera blared from a tinny speaker, while expectant customers waited like enraptured pilgrims at a religious shrine. He was so meticulous and the line so long that we waited nearly an hour for our slices. It was well worth the wait, though. Those slices could only be called miraculous.
We left that pizza shop convinced that the stars had aligned and we would now find an equally great rye. We walked past a few stores to a Russian bakery that had been recommended to us. The woman by the counter had clearly received her hospitality training in the waning days of Soviet communism; she wasn’t super friendly. We chose a rye from the stack in the display case. As we left the store, I grabbed a slice and handed one to Peter. Bummer. It wasn’t much of a rye bread. In fact it wasn’t rye at all, just an overmixed white bread with caraway seeds. I turned and went back into the store.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I may have misspoke. I wanted a rye bread.”
“Is rye,” said the woman, in a challenging tone of voice with a Russian accent as heavy as full-fat sour cream. “We use vite rye only.”
I am sure there was no “vite” (white) rye in that bread, just lowest-common-denominator commercial white flour. But arguing was going to get us nowhere, so we left no closer to our goal.
The closest we came to our goal was an artisan rye served at Manhattan’s Russ & Daughters Cafe. Though it’s a little heavy on the caraway for my taste (caraway can mask the flavor of the bread), it’s still an excellent loaf, and it encouraged me to try my hand at something similar. The Russ & Daughters rye bore all the hallmarks of a balanced sourdough. It confirmed my assumption that a great rye bread with a properly dense crumb requires a rye sourdough starter.
With that in mind, on a late fall afternoon, I began to mix my dough. I toasted the caraway seeds to concentrate their flavor and pump up the umami, and then I ground them to infuse the dough with caraway flavors but no dental-floss-demanding seeds. The result is this bread. Its crust has a pleasant chew, the sourdough imparts the right amount of acidity to complement pastrami or corned beef, and the crumb is dense enough that the bread holds together no matter how much deli mustard and coleslaw you heap on your sandwich.