Rye Awakening
An interview with Sophie Williams, of Raven Breads
[Happy 2025, all. I began working on this post well before the fires in Los Angeles erupted last week, and things obviously have gotten much worse since then. If you are looking for ways to support people there, this post from is a good place to start.]
As my Breaucation testers already know, I have been trying to perfect my 100%-rye loaves for some time now. Late last summer I decided to reach out to Sophie Williams, —of Bellingham, WA’s Raven Breads, whose whole-rye breads have long been an inspiration to me—for some advice. Sophie created a tiny-but-mighty zine on whole-rye baking called “Up Rye Zine”1—which she gives away for free on the bakery’s website—that I’d already found extremely helpful, so I was eager to hear more about her own journey with rye baking, and her approach to managing its many pitfalls.
This interview is a long one, but I think it is worth it for anyone who wants to tackle these amazing, if sometimes challenging breads (it certainly was for me), or anyone who loves a story of a small bakery coming into being.
(All of the images in this post were borrowed from Raven’s Instagram feed with permission.)
—Andrew
Andrew: I want to focus on ryes specifically, but I think my readers would first love to hear a little something about Raven Breads and your journey with it. Can you tell me about how you got started in baking, how you started the bakery, and where you are now?
Sophie Williams: I started the business in 2014 with no background in commercial baking or even in restaurant work. I had been working on farms and decided that that was not going to be my career. I knew that I liked working with my hands. And I had this kind of romantic idea of bread baking because I'd been going to the Kneading Conference West for a couple of years—which became the Grain Gathering—and meeting all these really amazing bakers. And so I decided to start a bakery.
I made really atrocious bread for a year. I was making “Tartine” bread poorly out of the commissary of a pizza restaurant in town, selling at farmer’s markets and by subscription. Somehow people kept buying my bread even though it was under-proofed or over-proofed or had tunnels down the middle or it was just—it was a mess.
Then I went and staged for maybe three weeks with Dawn Woodward in Toronto that first winter, and it was pretty transformative. I came back and decided I wasn't going to use white flour anymore—I stopped making Tartine bread and started doing all whole-grain baking. That meant that I basically had to relearn how to bake. So then I spent another year making and selling really horrible bread.
And people still bought it.
People still bought it.
You were fortunate to have customers who were willing to go with you on your journey to better bread.
Part of it, I think, was that there weren't a lot of options in town. And part of it was that I was twenty-five and enthusiastic, and people were just kind and felt some connection to me. I was already writing my newsletter and I think that personal connection made it possible. I was doing everything myself—when I was selling ugly bread, I was at least the one selling it and able to tell people [what happened] and apologize.
I kept doing that same business for almost a decade. It just got bigger and I moved to a different commissary kitchen, I added some wholesale, and I hired occasional part-time help to work the farmer’s markets or do deliveries. But basically I just did everything myself out of a pretty horrible, windowless commissary kitchen.
Maybe four or five years ago, I started looking for a space to build out myself. I had this really unrealistic idea of bootstrapping the business as I had been doing and not borrowing a ton of money, and it took me a couple years to find a space and also to come around to the idea of going into a lot of debt. So it was a pretty slow progression from 2014 to opening the shop in the beginning of 2023.
So it's been about a year-and-a-half since you've had the shop.
And it's great. I kind of wish I'd done it a long time ago, but also it's fine. I learned a lot running the business the way that I did. Now I have the shop, and I've got a bread baker, I've got a pastry baker, I've got retail staff, I've got farmer’s market staff, and we're still small—just five people. I've only got one mix shift a week now, which is pretty astonishing, and one really early morning. I'm in there most days, but there are days when I don't have to be, which is pretty sweet. It's a new thing to have staff, and a new set of skills to learn.
At what point in that arc did you start doing 100% rye-flour breads?
I think it was in year two, when I shifted to doing all whole-grain.
So it was something you knew you wanted to do early on. Were you already a fan of rye breads or did you get turned on to them by Dawn or someone else?
My best guess—this was a long time ago, and my memory is pretty spotty—I probably just started because that was what the local mills had. In 2014-15, we had one local mill, and they were direct-contracting their wheat and rye and buying-in their smaller-scale grains like buckwheat, corn, teff, and oats. Wheat and rye were the things they were direct-contracting, so those were the grains that I focused on.
Compared to your learning curve for wheat breads, how did you find the ryes?
Oh man, rye was so hard. There was no one! I still had the Grain Gathering—which doesn't exist anymore—and I was so lucky to have that for the first years that I had the bakery, because I could go once a year to “bread summer camp” and hang out with a bunch of people more experienced than I was and ask them questions and make connections. Every winter for the first maybe five or six years I would go and visit other bakeries and stage in them. Most of those connections were from that conference, either first- or second-degree connections from there.
But no one I talked to really understood what was going on with rye. People had rye breads that they were making in their bakeries, but they just made them the way they made them, and didn't know why they were making them that way.
For years I would ask people about flying roofs and gummy bottoms and all of the other issues that I had with my rye breads, and I would get different answers every time. “Maybe you should cool your breads upside down and then they won't have a hole in them or”…all sorts of things.
It wasn't until I took the Modern Bread [and Viennoiserie] class at SFBI, in maybe 2018. Thomas [Teffri-Chambelland] shared a lot of bread science, including rye science, and that was pretty transformative. About that same time I read James MacGuire's Real Rye Bread article in the Art of Eating. And I did a road trip through the Northeast and spoke to Randy George at Red Hen about this rye experiment that he and Jeffrey Hamelman did with the one of the grain breeders from the Vermont Extension. Those three pieces of input made it clear that I needed to understand the science of what was going on. And that was what I collated into that little rye zine.
Did you create the zine immediately, like, “Oh, I figured it all out now I want to share everything I know?”
Kind of, yeah. That was such a turning point for me, and now I feel like I can make up a rye recipe on the fly in the same way that I can make up a wheat recipe, because I understand the ratios and I understand the fermentation. Once in a while I will over- or under-ferment something, but I feel pretty comfortable with rye in the same way that I feel comfortable with wheat, and I just didn't for a long time. It just felt like such a black box for a long time because I didn't understand acidity and enzymes and what was going on inside the loaf.
It’s amazing that something that is so hard for most people, especially if they've never done it before, could be summarized in such a tiny little booklet, but you do an amazing job of getting at all the really important stuff. As a bread zine it's definitely one of the best—it's the perfect format for what it is and the all the information is there. I love it.
Thanks. When I wrote it I imagined that I would keep learning more at the same pace. I had that “rye awakening,” I guess. I had this idea that I would keep progressing at that same rate, and I'd write follow-ups. But I feel like that was it, that was what I needed, because now I can make functional rye bread consistently.
Unlike you I am not doing a ton of experimenting [anymore]. I make up new things for the bakery, but I tend to make up new things with the tools I already have, things that I know will be successful. It's not so common for us to start completely from scratch and do side-by-side tests on anything big, and so I don't feel like I've like had any big leaps of insight.
Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, I am working on a book. But I actually cannot wait now to get to the point where I can just put it out in the world and just use it and not have to test things. Now that I have a rye process that works for me, I'm just going to use it. I don't feel like I need to keep reinventing the wheel or trying other processes.
I want to talk through some of the ways that you make ryes and, I'll be honest, this is first and foremost for me, not my readers. I want to pass it along to them too, but really I want to I want to confirm the things that I feel are correct with somebody who's more experienced than me. So thank you for letting me run them by you for my own purposes.
Do you mix by hand now or did you mix by hand in the beginning?
I mixed by hand for the entire first decade, when I was in the commentary kitchen. Everything, not just bread but also like 30-kilo batches of cookie dough in bus tubs. But not anymore.
Is mixing ryes by machine just a question of having another set of hands, or do you feel like there's some other advantage to it?
It's a little hard to say because my ovens are so much better now too. I would hazard the guess that my wheat breads are not quite as nice being machine-mixed. I don't think it's changed the rye bread significantly. We're just mixing on first speed. So mostly it's body-saving. It's like the e-bike that we use for deliveries now. I wouldn't want to ask anyone else to treat their body the way that I treated mine.
How did mixing differ when it was done by hand?
When I was mixing my by hand I mixed everything—wheat and rye—just to incorporation. I have never done autolyses with rye, so it was just mixing everything together. I guess the only real difference—and this is hardly a difference, just a technicality—is that when hand-mixing I would always put in the water first and when machine-mixing we put the flour in first. Other than that, I would say it's pretty much just mixing to incorporation.
Jeffrey [Hamelman] in Bread has something I think about really long mixes, like the higher the rye percentage the longer the mix. But honestly I if we mix in first speed for three minutes or ten minutes, I don't feel like the bread comes out differently.
That's really useful to know because both Jeffrey and James emphasize the idea that the dough should achieve a certain consistency—or “flow”—at the end of mixing. It sounds like what you're saying is that it is really a question of formulation, not the amount of mixing, that dictates flow in rye doughs.
How do you think of “flow” in rye doughs and how you achieve it?
I don't have a good answer for that. We've like gone through so many different rye flour harvests in the past couple years, and they've all been so different, so I feel like most of our focus has been on trying to figure out hydration and fermentation timelines [for each]. I did write about flow in the zine and it was something that I have thought about more at other points. Of late, the differences have been so vast between the different rye flours that we've been getting that that's felt like the most important thing.
So how do you manage adjusting hydration when it comes to working with a new rye flour?
The last mill that we were buying from, the mill that we were buying from for eleven years, switched lots without telling us. They started buying in rye from who knows where, and we ended up having to reduce the hydration by 10%, which is a lot. And I had to start adding salt to the preferments—it was just super, super enzymatic. It made these incredibly beautiful breads, but was pretty hard to work with. And that was the weirdest rye thing we've experienced recently.
I’m sure that if I could keep getting that rye from them, I probably would have just figured it out and reformulated everything and continue to buy it, because the breads really were pretty stunning. But I ended up deciding to switch to a different local mill because I didn't trust them not to switch things up on me again and deny changing lots.
I think people they can get away with doing sketchy things with their rye because most people are blending it—using like 10% rye with 90% bread flour—so they're not going to notice that the flour is weird. But yeah, I don't think I have a tidy answer for you.
That's fine. To me, that's one of the other things that's challenging with ryes, especially if you're going to teach home bakers or beginners to work with it. I can send people to King Arthur all-purpose flour from the supermarket, and it's a known quantity that anybody, anywhere is going to make work. But when it comes to rye flour, who knows what people are getting, if they can find it. I'm sure most people in the States have a decent mill nearby but, still, it’s a wild card.
It does seem to me that whole-rye breads are pretty amenable to the hydration being not quite ideal and still getting something that's good, as long as the other aspects of the process are solid. But it's a challenging thing to call for 100% whole-rye flour and hope for the best for people at home. It's useful to know that even people who work with it all the time have challenges too.
Yeah, I think it's just an inevitable part of it being not even a secondary but a tertiary grain.
I feel like actually rye flour used to be easier to find in supermarkets. Other flours, especially wheat flour, are becoming more and more available, but rye seems to be going away, at least in terms of supermarket availability.
Can we talk about rye preferments and how they relate to the fermentation of the dough? In ryes, the sour is so much more important to the final dough. It's hard to talk about the fermentation of the dough without talking about the sour itself, because how much you use has such a strong bearing on things.
How much do you think about dough pH in terms of relying upon a pH meter or simply how much prefermented flour you use? Do you change that up, or are you pretty consistent from day-to-day or formula-to-formula?
I don’t measure pH. I bought a pH meter after the [SFBI] class with Thomas because it was such a big part it. But at some point I dropped it and it broke, and I didn't buy another one. But, in terms of acidity, I'm just looking for [dough] breakdown. I guess I'm using enzymatic activity as a proxy for pH. When I'm formulating our preferments, I am choosing the inoculation and the presence or absence or level of salt based on getting a fully-ripe, but not collapsing preferment at mix time.
And it’s the same for our final proofs—we're basically looking at dough breakdown. We're looking for a certain amount of breakdown, but not too much.
What hydration do you use in your sours?
100%.
Okay, so it's loose. I've been doing mine at 80%. It's on the stiff side, and it tends to move not that much. Did you ever do it that way, or have you always done it at 100%?
When we had that weird flour last month the month before I dropped the hydration in an attempt to control the fermentation. Although I'm not sure how much hydration actually has to do with enzyme activity, which was, I think, what was going on in that flour. But no, for the most part for ryes, I just stick to 100% hydration. I think I could have chosen a different hydration as a starting point and I would just be adjusting seed culture and salt based on that. All our preferments are quite long just because of our bakery schedule.
How long is long?
The preferments are getting mixed between 3 and 5pm, and the dough is getting mixed between 7 and 10am.
So it's about 18 hours.
Like right now, our rye inoculation is 3%. I'll probably drop that down to 2%, because it's getting warmer or maybe add some salt and pull back the salt in the final recipes a little bit.
And so you look for them to, to sort of level-off or slightly collapse?
Yeah, ideally I don't want it to collapse. I want like nice, steep shoulders. I want this:
Yeah, I know what I mean. You don't want it to dome, you want it to nearly flatten out.
Yeah, and I want it to smell sour and sweet. Our particular preferment right now is very fruity. When it's nice and ripe, it's got a lot of kind of banana smell. And there's surface breakdown on the rye, but I definitely don't want it getting soupy.
That makes sense. In terms of how much prefermented flour you use in the final dough, does that stay consistent or do you tweak that based on the formula itself?
It's consistent within a formula, we just change our desired dough temperature or fermentation temperature. So with 100%-rye bread, I’d generally be doing about 40% prefermented flour. Less if it contains wheat flour.
I've been doing 50% and while it seems to work, it has made me wonder whether I could dial it back and still get something good and maybe something a little bit less sour in the finished product.
I think you can go down to as low as 30% with 100%-rye bread.
I may play around with that. I also want to foolproof my recipes for other people. So something that is a little too sour may be better than something that for half of the people who make it, it’s going to fall apart in the oven.
For final dough temperatures and proof temperatures, how do you decide what you want those to be, and what do you typically aim for? Assuming the temperature is constant in wherever you're working.
It's not. Our desired dough temperature is changing seasonally. We do have climate control in the bakery—between like 65 and 80˚F—but those are very different temperatures. In the winter, I'm aiming at a higher temperature coming out of the mixer. And we’ll often extend the bulk a little bit, so we get more fermentation while the dough is warm, because it cools down so quickly once it's shaped.
I guess that's not really relevant for home bakers though, because their bulk is not bulk. So, yeah, for 100%-rye bread, we’re aiming somewhere between 80 and 90˚F depending on the time of year.
The test baker at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Hazim [Tugun], told me they were proofing in the mid-90s, which is bold. You have to be just right with your oven schedule if you're proofing that hot, because you could blink and miss it, and have your bread collapse.
Right. How long do you want your final proof to be?
We definitely haven't dialed it in completely. Right now [in the summer], we're about two-and-a-half hours from mixed to baked. And in the winter we are closer to four-and-a-half. Just because it’s pretty hard when you have a cold preferment and a cold soaker, there's so little water in the final dough—or in some of our I breads, no [additional] water—there's not [much you can do to] control dough temperatures. With wheat breads we can pretty consistently get it where we want it, but with rye it is more of a hope and an ambition.
You mentioned bulk fermenting when things are cold, to hold on to the mass of dough to keep it warm in the beginning. Is that really the only reason you would bulk ferment a rye dough versus moving straight from the mixer to pans?
Yeah, I don't think that bulk does anything for ryes. I think you could shape immediately or you could shape as you go into the oven and get the same results.
Oh, really? You just let it proof fully in the bowl and then scrape it in and bake it and you think you get something more or less the same?
I haven't actually tried that, but we definitely have had production days where things were going on and we didn't get to shaping until late. So we might have three hours of bulk and a half an hour of [final] proof and the end result looks identical.
That's interesting. I might play around with that. I feel like wherever you can find flexibility in recipes is going to be helpful for people. They tend to think, “If I don't do it the way I'm told, it’s not going to work,” and wherever you can tell people okay, don't stress too much. I don't know why you'd need to wait, but you could if you wanted to.
So then what do you look for in a fully-proofed rye bread?
At this point we have our scaling such that I can just like tell people to look at volume because there is a [specific] amount that the bread will be risen. But I am looking at the surface of the loaf, mostly looking for the most breakdown I’m comfortable with.
So you really, it's really about pushing it as far as it'll go before it’s collapsed.
Yeah.
What's your take on why some rye baker’s breads have that really dramatic, “baked-desert-floor” cracking versus a very fine cracking?
I feel like that dramatic cracking is [a sign of] under-proofing.
That's kind of my take too. That you shouldn't really get more than a little spring in the oven, and if you do, it's going to push up and form cracks. And that's something you would generally want to avoid, because it means you're not proofing long enough and that could cause other problems.
It also makes it hard to eat when you have giant divots in your bread. And because we do mostly pan breads, if we underproof we tend to get blowouts along the edge of the pan. So then you have creases coming in from the side, which are really inconvenient for sliced bread.
If I want cracking in a hearth loaf specifically, I can just proof it in a basket and have the dough contained, and then turn it out and let it open up for a minute to get that look, but also proof it properly. I’m not sure how you would do that in a pan bread.
I like that look, but I feel like the better I've gotten at making ryes, the less I'm able to get it. They tend to be more refined and flat on top, which is probably a good thing. Chasing down that kind of aesthetic over perfection in other ways is probably not a good idea.
Do you make many 100%-rye hearth loaves?
I like them, so once in a while I'll be stubborn and make one, but they don't really sell. It's [got] a lot of crust and it has a weird [cross-section]—if you're not doing meat and cheese plates like a German, what are you going to do with a bread like that? I've never gotten into those really upright Scandinavian breads—taller 100% rye hearth breads, the shiny ones like limpa. I feel like that would be a more practical profile, sales-wise.
What does your bake look like, is it hot with steam at first and then low for a long period of time, or something else?
When I was baking in a convection oven, yes, because I didn't have any thermal mass in the oven. It was basically the equivalent of a home oven. And in that case I was cranking the oven as hot as it would go because I was putting something like 2.7 kilos x 15 into the oven at once, which was pulling down the oven 200˚F as soon as I loaded it. But with the deck oven we just we bake it 375˚F top and bottom for an hour and a half for Pullman breads.
I'm guessing that at this point you probably just know when your ryes are done by just setting a timer, but would you judge when a loaf is done if you weren't sure? How do you tell from the outside?
With a pan bread, I want the side walls to be fully set. You can have a pan bread that's at temp [inside] but is still soft on the side. I think in general we bake to a hotter [internal] temperature, to avoid torn or slumping sides. So like 206 to 210˚F.
You don't feel like there's any downside to drying out the crust too much or thickening it too much?
No, because there's so much moisture in a rye loaf that it’s going to equilibrate. The first day it’s going to have a thick, hard crust, maybe, but within 24 hours, especially if you're at home and wrapping it in a cloth, or putting it in a bread box or something, the whole loaf is basically the same hydration.
That's good to know because there are some recipes that have you take the bread out of the pan and put it back in either the hot oven or an off oven.
Too complicated.
Yeah. Even if you're just doing one loaf, it's pain in the butt to do. I'm going to ditch that because I was happy with the way they were before anyway. And I was taking them pretty dark and pretty hot—at least 205˚F and sometimes higher. I guess that's one of the many ways that rye is more adaptable, as long as it has all that extra moisture in it. So it doesn't matter if your crust is dry to begin with.
Yeah, because you're not even generally eating it on the first day.
Yeah. Jim Williams says he likes to cut it into his breads when they're still hot. And I agree with him that when they're not overbaked, they're really delicious at that stage. But it's this brief moment where it's a very different bread and it goes away within a few hours. And then you have to wait a whole day to continue eating it. But it is really nice.
For years, when I was still collapsing bread all the time, I would have these “Oh, shit” panic moments, where I decided that I had collapsed the entire batch and I would get impatient and would cut a loaf in half. And it would just be gummy inside, as they are. And it would be really hard to tell what the crumb was like, so then I'd cut another one in half and [another one]. You can't stick them back together, they are still weird and gummy after they've cooled [when you do that].
Do you sell your breads the day they're made or do you hold them before you put them on the shelf?
We sell everything—wheat and rye—the next day, or for multiple days in the case of rye.
And do you tell people they're ready to eat at that point or do you tell them to wait still?
No, they're fine.
How do you recommend your customers store the bread when they take it home?
I feel it depends on the person—cut side down on the counter is easy if they're going to eat it within a week. And if they want to keep it longer, I'll often tell people to put it in a Ziploc or a wax wrap and stick it in the fridge, which I know is slightly blasphemous, but it makes it really easy to cut and it'll hold for like a month that way. It doesn't go stale because it's sour.
I've been thinking about saying the same thing, that putting it in plastic and into the fridge as the way to go, especially if you can't eat a whole loaf quickly. That’s another nice thing about ryes—that they don’t retrograde the way wheat breads do when they get cold.
I think it's the acidity that keeps it from staling because at the end of the week we’ll stick any leftover bread in the fridge to deal with the next week. The wheat breads are also fine. But they’re all sour.
We've already talked a little bit about your early issues with flying roofs, but what do you consider the pitfalls to rye baking, and what are the solutions to them?
I think the pitfalls are people baking by the book instead of baking by their senses. I feel like it mostly comes down to fermentation for rye: You have to fully ferment, or add acid. There are lots of rye recipes that use buttermilk or pickle juice or whatever to add acidity, and that's fine too. But if you're using sourdough, you have to have a mature culture going in, and you have to fully ferment the loaf.
And in terms of runaway amylase activity, to avoid gumminess or tunnels? Is that just a question of not over-fermenting in the pan?
Stopping when you need to stop. I do feel like [avoiding] over-fermentation is a much easier thing for people to learn than [avoiding] under-fermentation. I feel like for under-fermentation, like people want [an instruction] like, “Let the dough rise to a specific amount,” and that’s much harder to do with rye, because it depends upon the flour [and other factors].
How do you deal with things like inclusions or seeds or spices? How does using them change the process?
I would say that for small inclusions like spices or if I swap out 10 to 15% of the flour for cornmeal or something, I don’t worry about it, I just do a one-for-one swap or just add the spices in. If I'm adding a lot of inclusions, then I'm looking at the total formula, so I know what percent hydration I'm aiming for, or what percent salt compared to all of the dry ingredients. So it’s just adjusting, based on everything added together.
What about liquids? I was scrolling through Instagram and saw that you were adding orange syrup leftover from candying oranges to one formula.
If I'm adding applesauce, molasses, orange syrup, cooked potatoes, zucchini, or whatever it is, I’ll just ballpark what I think the hydration is and then include that when I'm calculating the overall hydration.
Are you are you adjusting on the fly in the mixer? Do you hold back liquid and just get to the same basic consistency in the bowl?
One could do that, but that's not usually what I do. I’m usually messing around in a spreadsheet with the additions—the percent hydration, percent prefermented flour, moving numbers around until I have the balance of factors that I'm looking for. I don't think that's necessary for home baking. So what if you collapse a loaf? In general, if you're not adding things that are wetter than your dough, you’ll be fine. If you're adding things that are wetter, then hold back water and add a little extra salt.
How often do you add wheat to your rye formulas?
Our staple rye is 60/40 rye-wheat, and it is what it is. It’s one of the first breads I started making and it’s shifted slightly over the years, but it’s a seedy rye and wheat bread. It’s very approachable. It’s got caraway and coriander—it’s like a gateway rye.
Do you ferment that one at all differently than your 100%-ryes?
The preferemented flour is a little bit lower, I think it is closer to 30%, and we’re usually mixing it a little bit cooler. The thought there is that we will passively build some gluten strength during the bulk, but I don’t know if that’s actually true. We do give it an hour-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours of bulk.
And then another hour or two in the pan?
Yeah, something like that. When I was mixing by hand, I would mix the base dough of that one—the wheat, rye, preferment, salt, and water—with the idea that I would build more strength that way, then I would add all the inclusions a little bit later.
But you don’t anymore?
No, we just put everything together [in the mixer]. I'm very much a fan of making everything as easy as possible. We shape as little as possible, we eliminate stages whenever we can.
I think that covers just about everything, thank you so much for chatting with me!
Sorry I didn’t have tidy answers for everything you asked. I feel like I’ve become the baker who was so maddening [for me] in the beginning—we just do things the way we do things!
The pun in the title of this zine is only one I noticed typing it out just now.
What a treat to see this long convo with Sophie! I'm such a fan of her baking and that zine --- now I have to find my copy!
Fantastic info. Whenever you feature a baker/bakery I just want to go there immediately and taste their breads. But what I really loved were the itty-bitty drawings in Sophie's zine of the Instagram crumb shots - hilarious!