I enjoy exploring ancient and modern wheats, whole grain, sifted, and refined flours, and different forms of leavening, and this artisan-style bread recipe embodies my love of all these possibilities. It’s made with a delicious combination of flours: organic bread flour from hard red spring wheat for loft and chew, ancient emmer wheat flour for nutty sweetness, and rye flour for earthy-grassy notes and staling-resistance. I chose to leaven the dough with yeast, which you don’t see very often in Breadtopia recipes given our passion for sourdough, so our yeast baker fans can have a break from converting recipes from sourdough to yeast and also to work on my own yeast-leavening skills.
Emmer wheat (aka farro medio) on the left; Rye on the right
I typically use yeast for enriched breads like brioche and challah, because it’s easier to get a fluffy crumb and a caramelized crust with yeast. With sourdough, you need to begin strategically feeding your starter one or more days ahead and that doesn’t always work with my schedule.
You might think that if a person can bake artisan-style crusty breads with sourdough, then baking this same sort of bread with yeast would be easy. Not so! Figuring out how much yeast to use for a targeted fermentation time requires experience and observation, just like with sourdough. You could default to using a packet of yeast (2 1/4 tsp) and have bread ready in about 3 hours, but I’ve found that a longer rise is better. Time develops both flavor and gluten strength, so too rapid leavening in this style of bread results in minimal score bloom (no ear) and an overpowering aroma of yeast rather than the wheat flavors shining through.
For my first attempt at this recipe, I used 1/4 tsp yeast and mixed the dough just before bed in a 70°F kitchen. About nine hours later, the dough had more than tripled. This small amount of yeast likely would have taken longer on a white flour dough, but whole grain rye and emmer boosted the fermentation. I salvaged the situation by shaping and baking the dough as Turkish Pide, which I highly recommend everyone try, either with this dough or the original sourdough recipe formula.
For the next attempt, I reduced the yeast amount to 1/8 tsp and mixed the dough in the morning so I could keep an eye on it. With a warmer ambient temperature of 76°F, the dough doubled and was ready to shape in about 6.5 hours. With a sourdough, I might have refrigerated the proofing basket until the next day, but given how active this dough was and my relative inexperience with instant yeast in this scenario, I didn’t want to risk it. I let the dough rise at room temperature for about an hour and then baked it. You can see how much I let the dough rise in the Photo Gallery below the recipe.
Excellent texture and flavor
Emmer and Rye Artisan Bread
Nutty ancient emmer wheat, grassy-earthy rye — which also adds resistance to staling — and strong organic bread flour combine in this delicious yeast-leavened artisan-style bread.
Total Time
1 hour, 5 minutes
Instructions
- This dough had a 6.5-hour first rise (calculated from the initial mixing) at 76°F and a 1-hour final proof. With different temperatures and more or less instant yeast, you can modify this timing.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk together the flours, salt, and instant yeast.
- Add the water and mix on low speed with the dough hook attachment for 1-2 minutes. The dough will be somewhat shaggy and sticky. The dough mixing and re-mixing below can be done by hand if you don’t have a stand mixer, or you can mix briefly and do several rounds of stretching and folding with rests in between over the course of a couple of hours.
- Cover the bowl and let the dough rest for one hour.
- Mix again, now on med-high speed, for 12 minutes. The dough will wrap around the hook and look silky by the end of the mixing.
- Transfer the dough to a straight-walled container if you have one. Cover and let it rise until it is between 1.5x and 2x the original size, an expansion of 50-100%.
- Scrape the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and shape it to your preference (boule, batard, oblong loaf). Make sure you build tension on the surface of the dough and dust it with flour before placing it seam-side up in your proofing basket.
- Cover the basket and let it rise again for about 1 hour. I don’t recommend refrigerating this dough overnight because the fermentation is very active and it is likely to overproof.
- Preheat your oven and baking vessel to 500°F for 30 minutes.
- Flip the dough out of the proofing basket and onto a sheet of parchment paper or a silicone bread sling. Score and load into your baking vessel and oven.
- Bake for 20 minutes at 500°F, lid on, with the option to uncover and re-score the dough at the 7-minute mark and the lid back on afterward.
- After the 20 minutes of baking, drop the temperature to 450°F, remove the lid, bake another 15 minutes or until the internal temperature is over 205°F.
- Let the bread cool for several hours before you slice it.
