The Sourdough Rye Tin Loaf Bake-Along Where I Finally Ran the Numbers (And Got a Shock)

It is late August and the kitchen is warm even before the oven goes on. The windows are fogged from a week of close, humid evenings, there is a half-drunk glass of something cold on the worktop, and on the shelf above it sits a bag of dark rye flour I picked up from a stall at Borough Market a few weeks back. I had been meaning to do something serious with it all summer. This weekend felt like the moment.

I wanted to make a proper sourdough rye tin loaf: dense, deeply flavoured, the kind of thing you slice thin and eat with good butter and whatever cheese is knocking about. But before I even touched the flour, I did something I should have been doing all along. I ran the numbers. Not just the formula, but the actual cost of the bake, ingredient by ingredient, using the Costing Calculator on the DoughRise site. What came back genuinely surprised me, and it changed a few things about how I approached the bake.

Why Rye, and Why Now

Rye flour behaves completely differently to strong white bread flour. It has a much lower gluten-forming capacity, which means the dough never really gets that tight, elastic feel you are used to from a regular sourdough. Instead it is sticky, heavy, almost porridge-like when the hydration is high. A tin is not optional with a high-rye loaf, it is essential, because the dough will not hold a free-form shape on its own.

What rye does have in abundance is flavour. Deep, slightly bitter, earthy. When it ferments with a sourdough starter, it develops a complexity that white flour just cannot match. It also ferments fast, especially in summer heat, so timing matters more than usual. Keep that in mind as we go through the steps.

The loaf I was aiming for used a blend rather than 100% rye, partly for manageability and partly because I wanted a slightly more open crumb than a pure rye gives you. The formula I landed on was 60% dark rye flour and 40% strong white bread flour, with a hydration of 80% and a rye starter (I had switched my small second starter to rye a couple of months ago, fed on dark rye and water). The loaf was going into a standard 900g tin.

Running the Costing Calculator First

Here is where it got interesting. Before I mixed anything, I opened the Costing Calculator and entered every ingredient with its weight and what I actually paid for it.

My total dough weight was 950g (accounting for a bit of bake-off loss, I wanted to finish close to 800g). Working back from that, my ingredient weights looked like this: dark rye flour at 360g, strong white bread flour at 240g, water at 480g, salt at 12g, active rye starter at 190g (at 100% hydration, so that contributed roughly 95g flour and 95g water to the totals, which I had already factored in). Caraway seeds went in at 8g because rye without caraway feels like a missed opportunity.

The prices I entered were based on what I had actually paid:

• Dark rye flour (Borough Market, small-batch stone-ground): £4.20 for 1kg, so 360g cost £1.51
• Strong white bread flour (supermarket own-brand): £1.20 for 1.5kg, so 240g cost £0.19
• Water: negligible, logged as £0.00
• Salt (flaky sea salt): £2.80 for 250g, so 12g cost £0.13
• Caraway seeds: £1.90 for 50g, so 8g cost £0.30
• Rye starter: I split the starter cost across its feeds. A week of dark rye feeding to keep 200g of starter active cost me roughly £0.40 in flour. I attributed half of that to this bake, so £0.20.

The calculator also made me notice I had been slightly underweighting the starter in previous bakes. I had been doing 15% inoculation, but with rye fermenting quickly in this heat, I knocked it down to 12% to give myself a little more time. The calculator made it easy to adjust that ratio and see the new gram weights instantly.

Mixing the Dough

With the numbers confirmed, I mixed everything together in one go. Rye dough does not need the same coaxing as a white sourdough. There is no point doing stretch and folds to build tension that the dough is not capable of holding. Instead I did a thorough initial mix in the bowl, making sure every bit of flour was fully hydrated, then covered it and left it alone.

Because of the August warmth (kitchen sitting at around 24°C), I kept a close eye on the fermentation. My target was about 30 to 35% volume increase, and I was checking every 45 minutes. With rye, you are also looking for the surface to start looking bubbly and slightly domed rather than dramatically risen. At the 3-hour mark the dough had reached roughly 33% volume increase and smelled properly tangy. That was my cue to move.

Loading the Tin

I greased the tin with a thin layer of neutral oil (a light olive oil works fine) and tipped the dough in. The key move with a high-rye tin loaf is to smooth the top surface with a wet spatula or wet fingers to get a slightly domed finish. As the loaf bakes, that dome cracks naturally along the top, which is exactly what you want aesthetically and structurally. Do not score a rye tin loaf the way you would score a white sourdough. The dough is not elastic enough to open cleanly. Let it crack on its own terms.

I covered the tin loosely with a damp cloth and left it for a final proof of about 60 to 75 minutes at room temperature. In this heat that was plenty. I was looking for the dome to just start creeping above the lip of the tin.

Baking

Oven preheated to 230°C (fan off, conventional mode). For a tin loaf I bake covered for the first 20 minutes: I use an old roasting tray inverted over the top of the tin. This traps steam from the dough itself and keeps the surface from setting too quickly, giving the loaf room to push up before the crust locks. After 20 minutes I removed the tray cover, dropped the temperature to 210°C, and baked for a further 35 to 40 minutes until the internal temperature hit 96°C.

Do not skip the temperature check on a rye loaf. Because rye retains so much moisture, it can look done on the outside while still being gummy and underbaked in the middle. A probe thermometer is the only reliable signal here.

Out of the oven, I tipped it immediately out of the tin onto a wire rack. This part is non-negotiable: leaving it to cool in the tin traps steam under the crust and makes the bottom go soft. Then came the hard part. Rye loaves need a minimum of 2 hours before cutting, ideally more. The crumb is still setting as it cools. I left mine until early evening, put on a bit of Midland, and tried very hard not to touch it.

What the Slice Looked Like

Dense and moist with a tight, even crumb. Not airy, not chewy in the way white sourdough is chewy. More like a good, cohesive structure that holds its shape when you cut it thin. The flavour was deep and slightly bitter with that background tang from the rye fermentation. The caraway came through clearly without being aggressive. Honestly one of the better loaves I have made this summer, and I bake a lot of bread.

The costing exercise had one unexpected effect beyond the numbers: it made me more deliberate about every ingredient. When you have actually looked at what a bag of stone-ground rye costs and decided it is worth it, you treat the dough with a bit more respect.

I had a question mid-bake about whether to adjust the final proof time given the temperature spike that afternoon, and I ran it past the DoughRise Coach. It came back with a clear answer about what to look for visually rather than just a fixed time, which was exactly the kind of practical steer I needed in the moment rather than a generic guideline.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by Nadin Sh on Pexels