There’s a great bakery in Pittsburgh called Mediterra Bakehouse. It’s out on your way to the airport and they have been pushing the artisan bread movement in Pittsburgh right from the moment they opened in 2001. Of course Pittsburgh hasn’t always been a food town, but beginning about 5 years ago (around the time Mediterrra started baking) the first chefs were arriving on the scene who would, rather quickly, push Pittsburgh up near the top of the list of cities where you can find great food.

The place is owned by Nick Ambeliotis but the production is run by a guy named Andrew Troth. Andrew is a good guy and he knows a lot about baking bread. One of the interesting things about Mediterra is that no one there came with prior baking experience. Nick came as a food importer, and Andrew came from the high-tech industry. Come to think of it, one guy worked at a doughnut shop, but that’s it.

At Mediterra they produce a wide variety of breads, and are introducing a dessert line these days. They use the standard array of preferments and starters, including poolish for their baguettes and a levain for their naturally leavened breads. Their levain is fed once a day and is built daily from a chef (dough that has been held back from the previous day’s production). One of the difficulties Andrew has had to overcome with levain+chef method is that variation in the hydration of the chef (it’s from a finished bread dough after all) must be accounted for in the amount of water used to feed the levain. An additional point to note about this method is that the chef has salt in it. One typically doesn’t find salt being added to a levain but it does have the benefit of damping the fermentation slightly yielding more control. I know of at least one other bakery in New York, that uses a straight traditional levain, but they directly add salt to it for exactly the same reason: control.

In addition to the breads that Andrew inherited (and improved upon) when he took over as production manager at Mediterra, he has also developed several formulas of his own, including a rosemary/olive oil bread and a great rye bread as well. The evolution of the rye bread, like most breads in a bakery was customer driven. Mediterra has been making bread for Katzinger’s Deli in Columbus, Ohio for some time. They were originally making a rye loaf in which they pre-fermented all of the rye flour and some white wheat flour as added to the mix as well. Katzinger’s said they felt that particular rye was too “rich” for their tastes so Andrew set out to remake the Mediterra rye. One of his first steps was to remove the white flour and cut back on the amount of pre-fermented rye flour. He decreased the pumpernickel flour and increased the medium rye flour.

One of the remarkable things about rye bread is its need for an acidified dough. Wheat flour contributes the gluten forming proteins gliadin and glutinen enabling a developed dough to capture the gas being produced by the fermenting yeasts and thus raise the dough. Rye flour, on the other hand has very little gluten forming capabilities and as such, relies on a starch matrix to capture the gas and give the dough structure. Starch is rapidly degraded into its simpler components due to the action of amylase (an enzyme). Since we want our rye loaves to have some structure often wheat flour is added to lend its gluten forming capabilities to the loaf. But even with that, if the percentage of rye is over 20% then the dough must be acidified to slow the action of amylase.

With that all that said you will find here, Andrews fantastic Deli Rye Bread. The notes are his and he contributes much info to enable the successful making of this great bread.