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.

Rye Crust Diary is one person, one oven and a jar of rye starter that has stood on the same shelf since the spring of 2021. I bake in a flat on the fourth floor in Frankfurt am Main, in a kitchen that holds two people badly, with an oven nine centimetres narrower than the tin I actually want. Everything written here came out of that oven. If a method needed a stone deck, a steam injector or a proving cabinet, it did not survive long enough to reach these pages.

The bread is mostly rye, partly because rye is what this city and the flat country north of it have always eaten, and partly because rye forgave me while I was learning. A mixed loaf of roughly seventy percent rye goes in most weeks of the year. Whole grain comes out of a tin once the weather turns. Rolls happen on Sunday mornings, when there is time to be slow about them. None of that was a plan; it is simply what remained after three years of trying things that did not work.

The entries are written for me, in the week the bake happened, with the timings as they ran rather than as they should have. Where a loaf failed I have left the failure in, because the failed ones taught me most and a diary that records only good days is a sales brochure with dates on it. I am an amateur. Nothing here is instruction, nothing is for sale, and I do not name the mills, the market stalls or the people who have patiently answered my questions.