Great article about the details of autolysis. I bake rye sourdough using a recipe I’ve twiddled with for maybe 20 years. It’s a “no knead” recipe, very easy to do. I recently decided to try autolysing the flour (12.5% rye, 60% KA, 23% whole wheat bread flour, 6% rye starter, about 70% water, and I also add two tbl each of caraway and dried onion to 1000g of flour) by first dissolving the starter in the water and then mixing in the flour and letting it sit for 30 minutes before adding the salt and continuing with four “stretch and folds” at 20 minute intervals. The dough doubled in about the same time as usual, but it was definitely fluffier with more air than it had had in previous ferments. After baking, the crust seemed really hard, but when the bread had cooled, the inside was chewy and moist and the crust had softened just enough so that it was that perfect crispy/chewy texture you want from a rye bread. I’ll be experimenting some more with relative proportions of flour, but this was darn close to the “corn rye” (no corn, that’s just what it was called) bread I remember getting from Jewish bakeries in my childhood.

Thanks for the science here - I came looking for that after my experiment seemed to work, and you’ve confirmed what I thought I saw and added to my understanding.

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