Twenty minutes from rye field to loaf
I buy rye flour in one-kilo paper bags, and I have never given much thought to what happened before the bag. This film, which I found on Wikimedia Commons, fixed that in twenty minutes. It was made by the LVR-Institut at an open-air museum in Germany. I had nothing to do with it; I just watched it twice.
It follows winter rye through the whole year, done the old way. The first few minutes are horses pulling a seed drill across a field in autumn, which is slower and quieter than anything I expected. Rye goes in before winter, sits under the frost, and comes up early. That is the whole reason it grows where wheat sulks.
Around the middle the harvest arrives, and then the threshing. Watch for the flails. Several people beat the sheaves on a barn floor in a rhythm, and they do not hit each other, which I would not trust myself to manage for thirty seconds. After that the grain is winnowed and taken to be milled, and the flour that comes out is a lot coarser and darker than mine.
The last part, from roughly fifteen minutes in, is the oven. They fire it with bundles of wood, let it burn down, rake out the embers and swab the floor before the loaves go in. Nobody checks a thermometer. Someone puts a hand inside for a moment and decides.
Three things I took from it:
- The proportion of the work that is baking is tiny. Most of it is the field.
- Rye bread was never meant to be eaten warm. A family that fires the oven once a week needs bread that keeps, and rye keeps.
- The loaves are big, round and dark, with flour on the crust and cracks across the top. Mine look like that by accident. Theirs look like that on purpose.
I baked a plain 80% rye in a tin the following evening, with Morris, the starter, doing what he was told for once. It was fine. It was also made from a paper bag, and I thought about the horses while I ate it.