50% Rye Rebuilt With Altus: Grinding Yesterday's Loaf Back Into Today's

Ingredient	Amount	%
Bread flour	500 g	50 %
Rye flour	500 g	50 %
Water	820 g	82 %
Sourdough starter	300 g	30 %
Salt	23 g	2.3 %

Ingredient

Amount

Bread flour

500 g

50 %

Rye flour

500 g

50 %

Water

820 g

82 %

Sourdough starter

300 g

30 %

Salt

23 g

2.3 %

Shaping	long oval in a rye couche, heavily floured
Scoring	three shallow parallel cuts, sawing motion not pressing, 4 mm
Bake curve	235 °C, 25 min steam, 50 min
Crumb rating	4/5 · 20% · dense but not heavy, deep brown, keeps a week

Shaping

long oval in a rye couche, heavily floured

Scoring

three shallow parallel cuts, sawing motion not pressing, 4 mm

Bake curve

235 °C, 25 min steam, 50 min

Crumb rating

4/5 · 20% · dense but not heavy, deep brown, keeps a week

Altus is old bread — usually rye — ground up and put back into the next dough. German bakeries have done this for centuries because stale rye is a better ingredient than it is a food. At 12% of total flour weight, ground altus adds a deep, roasted sweetness that fresh rye flour does not have, holds moisture for days, and lets you use bread that would otherwise go to the birds.

Grinding yesterday's loaf

Take 250 g of two-day-old rye, cut off any crust that has gone hard, and grind it in a food processor or blender to a coarse meal — you want pieces about the size of cracked wheat, not powder. Soak it in 200 g of hot water for an hour before mixing. It will absorb almost all of it, and the soaked altus weighs around 400 g when it goes into the dough.

Ingredient	Weight	Baker's %
Bread flour	250 g	50%
Medium rye	250 g	50%
Altus, soaked	400 g	12% of flour weight
Water	410 g	82%
Rye starter 1:4:4	150 g	30%
Salt	11.5 g	2.3%

What altus does to the ferment

Soaked altus is essentially pre-gelatinised starch and sugar, and it feeds the starter hard. Expect the bulk to run about 25% faster than a plain 50% rye: 3 hours at 24 °C to a 30% rise instead of 4 hours. Two folds only, both gentle, because the altus grit interrupts the gluten network and too much handling tears it.

Baking and the long rest

235 °C, 25 minutes of steam, 50 minutes total, then the part most people skip: rest the loaf 24 hours before the first slice. Altus rye is noticeably better on day two and peaks on day three, when the ground bread has absorbed the moisture evenly and the crumb has stopped being crumbly at the edges.

Crumb rating 4/5: dense but not heavy, deep brown, keeps a week.
Three parallel shallow cuts at 20 degrees, sawn rather than pressed.
The loaf weighs about 1.3 kg. Cut it in half and freeze one half.

Do not use altus that has mould on it, and do not use bread that has been in the fridge for two weeks — old bread tastes of old bread, and no amount of soaking hides it.

Sources / 参考来源

Published reference works consulted for this log:

Questions that came up

Can I use wheat bread instead of rye for the altus?

Yes, and the result is milder and lighter in colour. Wheat altus at 12% is barely detectable; rye altus at the same level is a defining flavour. If you want it obvious, use rye.

My loaf was crumbly on day one. What went wrong?

The altus was not soaked long enough or the loaf was cut too early. An hour of soaking is the minimum; 90 minutes is better. And rest the baked loaf a full day — altus rye genuinely changes character overnight.