Yeast adventures

I don't bake a lot of bread or yeast doughs, because I don't eat a lot of bread qua bread. But I almost always have some homemade whole wheat in the freezer, and because I'm only using up my five-pound bag of rye flour in quarter-cup increments, and because I had a hankerin' for something chewy and full of caraway seeds, I pulled out the ole trusty pumpernickel recipe. I gave it three risings. The first for about 2 hours, the second for another 2 hours, and the third for about 90 minutes. By that time, it was getting close to bedtime, so despite the dough looking maybe 10% larger despite more than 5 hours of rising in a warm place, I baked it.

It is bread. And it is chewy and laced with caraway seeds. But it's also dense as, dense as, my similes have abandoned me. It's a hard dense loaf, tasty but heavy. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with it for lunch. Thin slices of pumpernickel and Gruyere cheese on the George Foreman grill. It wasn't bad, but I think this loaf is better suited to eating with soup. I must have killed the yeast at some point.