Bread Baking Babes - Mary's Dark Onion Rye

I thought this month's Bread Baking Babes recipe was especially exciting: the recipe we were baking came from the brain of our very own Mary. She asked us to try her recipe for Dark Onion Rye bread that she's developed. How cool is that!


We had to bring our starters out of hibernation. I was always worried that my starter Craterface wasn't quite up to snuff, by finally he looked like a starter should.

The starter was fed, and then part of it was mixed with flour (both white and rye) and water and left to ferment overnight.
The next morning the sponge (above) was mixed with the rest of the ingredients. Man, did that dough smell amazing!
And was left to rise. Here it is before the rising,
and here it is after. I left the dough to rise for about 6 hours, and it didn't rise much at all.
After a couple more hours for the second rise, which didn't do much either, I baked the bread.


It wasn't super fantastic, but it wasn't awful either. The bread lost most of the onion smell that the raw dough had, which was kind of disappointing. I didn't taste any onion either, but the rye flour and the sourness of Craterface was quite strong. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've eaten rye bread, so to others (like Scott) the taste was more pleasant than strong.
If you've read all the other BBB posts (they are listed in the right hand column) you'll see a lot of talk from people wayyyyyy more experienced than me with bread discussing all sorts of possibilities for why some of us had more success with the bread than others. I am nowhere near as bread-savvy as them, but I have two ideas why mine didn't rise as much as it could have. One is that I didn't spend enough time with my starter after taking it out of the fridge. Craterface is my first starter, and I think I misunderstood the feeding instructions, and I don't think he was as strong as he should have been. Good lord, I just called my starter a he. Second is I think I added too much flour. My dough was really really stiff. I am still working on getting over my very bad baking habit of adding all the flour to the dough. Sometimes you just don't need all that flour. I was hoping to try to make it again before our posting date, but man, the days just go by so fast lately. I'd like to try this again with the new modifications Mary has made to the recipe - please go here for Mary's recipe.
Thanks to Mary and the BBB's for another great month!