Bakes5 cards in the box

Seventy percent rye, a narrow oven, and one jar fed twice a week since 2021.

A home baker's diary from Frankfurt am Main: rye sourdough, mixed loaves, Sunday rolls, and a starter kept alive through five summers.

Kitchen: Frankfurt am Main, Hesse
Country: Germany
Jar kept since: 2021
Card last corrected: 6 Sept 2026

A home kitchen in Frankfurt am Main, Germany — writing the bakes down since 2021.

Twenty-six hours

Where the time in a rye loaf actually goes

Almost none of it is work. The two stretches that matter are the sixteen hours the sour spends alone and the four the loaf spends cooling, and both of them happen while I am somewhere else.

0 hRefreshJar down off the shelf, fed one to two to two.
5 hSourWhole rye and water, then sixteen hours on the counter.
21 hMixFour minutes on slow, until hydrated and no further.
22 hBulkCovered bowl, one hour, no folding and no poking.
23 hShapeWet scraper, rye dust on the bench, under a minute.
24 hProveBanneton, seventy minutes, fine cracks just showing.
25 hBakePot on for twenty, two-fifty falling to two-ten.
26 hRestFour hours on the rack before anyone finds a knife.

The card box

Five bakes, written up the week they happened

Each card carries the timings as they ran, not as the recipe hoped. Where a loaf failed, the card says so and stays in the box.

Card 05Whole grain

Vollkornbrot in a tin: six failures and a very long bake

A whole-grain rye loaf that took a winter to get right: a soaker, a scald, a lid on the tin, three hours of low heat, and a full day of waiting.

Baked 14 Jun 20262026 · 9 min

Card 04Flour

Flour from two small mills, and what it changed in the loaf

Whole rye ground last week behaves nothing like sacked flour: what the type numbers mean, how much more water it drinks, and how to store it.

Baked 23 Nov 20252025 · 8 min

Card 03Rolls

Sunday Brötchen: the small-oven routine that survived three winters

Six rolls on a Sunday morning without getting up early: a Saturday half hour, a cold night on the middle shelf, and an oven that only fits six.

Baked 13 Apr 20252025 · 6 min

Card 02Mixed rye

Roggenmischbrot at seventy percent rye in a small oven

The mixed loaf I bake most weeks: why seventy percent rather than ninety, a sour in one stage or three, and a bake without any steam.

Baked 6 Oct 20242024 · 8 min

Card 01Starter

Nine weeks before the rye starter was worth baking with

How a jar of rye flour and tap water took two months to become reliable, and the things I got wrong while waiting for it.

Baked 18 Apr 20242024 · 7 min

Open the whole box

Pinned above the bench

Four lines I keep having to relearn

I bake rye bread in a small kitchen oven in Frankfurt and write down what the dough actually did, so that the next loaf has to argue with a record instead of with my memory.

Write the timings down while the loaf is still warm.
Rye is not slow wheat. Stop handling it like wheat.
Temperature decides more than the clock ever does.
Keep the failures in the notebook, in full.