Jēkabpils Rye—Latvia

Jēkabpils Rye is another delicious custard bread from Latvia. I found this recipe on Sergey Kirillov's ХЛЕБ & ХЛЕБ (Bread & Bread) blog; Sergey, in turn, sourced this recipe from "National hearth bread made from rye flour. RST LatvSSR 815-78" Official edition. State Planning Committee of the Latvian SSR, Riga, 1978. This bread is typical of many Baltic ryes that have multiple stages. These stages include preparing a thick rye sourdough and a separate multi-hour rye flour scald; fermenting the scald with the sourdough for several hours; and, finally, preparation of the dough. 

I tried Gary Bishop’s suggestion to use Google NotebookLM to prepare a translation and summary of the process. The AI is a little chatty, so the summary is five pages long! (Google Drive link). Here are the quantities used for each stage:

The sourdough was prepared as described in the blog, except I used more water to compensate for my culture being 85% instead of 100% and was fermented for 5 h. I prepared the scald in a glass dish and used rye malt instead of whole rye flour, as did Sergey. The mixture was heated for 3 h in an InstantPot maintaining a water bath at 63‒65 °C using the Keep Warm setting. The scald becomes much thinner and darkens some during the heating period.

The sourdough was combined with the cooled scald and heated for 16 h in the InstantPot water bath at ≈30 °C using the Yogurt-Less setting. I watched this step for several hours and stirred it occasionally to knock down the bubbles and it seemed to have settled down. But the next morning, I found that some had overflowed even though it was a 1.7 L dish.

The dough was mixed (note: I doubled the salt to 1.0%) and the bulk fermentation was extended because the dough temperature was well under the 30 °C Sergey describes. However, I really couldn't tell when the bulk was ready because there was not a lot of expansion. I attempted to replicate the 40 °C proofing conditions with a pan of boiling water in a toaster oven but I could only get the temperature to ≈35 °C. I thought I was seeing some pinholes in the loaf after 55 min, so I figured it was time to bake. The blank was coated with a slurry of rye flour in water (18 g rye flour, 56 g water) and baked for 55 min at 230 °C in a toaster oven; final temperature 95 °C. It was glazed with a cornstarch slurry at the end of baking.

If you ignore the large crack on the side, the loaf looks pretty good. The crack indicates that the dough wasn’t ready for baking and needed a longer proof. The crumb is dense and soft, almost cake-like; no wonder these types of bread are referred to as custard breads. The crust is leathery in a good way; no cracking a tooth on a rock-hard crust like found on some German rye breads.

But the best part about the bread is the flavor—fantastic! The combination of the scald and the prolonged sour-scald really create the flavorful sweet-sour characteristic of the bread. I would still rank the similar Latgalian Rye as slightly better in flavor, but this bread is not far behind. Jēkabpils Rye is well worth the effort.