The Rye is released...

I made 2 kinds of rye bread, same recipe but one I used the rye flour for the preferment, the other I used regular bread flour for the preferment. I made 4 mini boules from each, differentiated them by one slash for regular and two for rye preferment, and they went to a couple different households. Preliminary feedback (my wife) said that the rye preferment doesn't taste as strongly of rye, which would make sense if it got broken down during the prefermentation. Which would be sad, because rye preferment lends more structure than if the rye flour is added later.

While I wait for two households outside my own to give me feedback, I'm working on a quantity over quality study, seeing how many loaves I can bake at once on the average cookie sheet. In prep for this I made a simple preferment which is 3 times that of Alton Brown's basic bread recipe, which alone calls for 1 lb of flour. So all told I will have about 5-6 lbs of dough to make into probably mini-boules, which range about 7 oz on average when I quarter a single batch of dough that takes 1 lb of flour. I'm looking forward to this one, because it will be plenty of bread to give away for no apparent reason other than I wanted to see how many fit on a pan.