Parbaking, Pretzels and Rye

"Parbaking is a cooking technique in which a bread or dough product is partially baked and then rapidly frozen for storage. The raw dough is baked normally, but halted at about 80% of the normal cooking time, when it is rapidly cooled and frozen."

-- Wikipedia. They really want donations now.

Last time I made rye bread I parbaked a loaf and stuck it in the freezer so my housemates wouldn't starve without fresh bread. That was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I realized that it may provide a good way to have fresh, homemade bread without the 4-6 hour lead time.  So this weekend while I was making rye bread (8 hours) I decided to experiment with parbaking a simpler loaf.

I mixed up a simple loaf--white flour, water, salt, yeast, and some whole wheat flour and olive oil for flavor, and no recipe because I eyeballed everything except for the salt--and set it to rise while I prepped my rye bread loaves for the oven. The rye got the silpat treatment, with a dusting of flour and a nice shaping (I forgot to slash until 5 minutes into baking, which was a shame). 

The whole wheat was divided in two and plopped down into my loaf pans to help me control the variables I'm working with.  Loaf bread will have the same shape regardless of its hydration level, meaning that varying my ad-hoc recipe will still give somewhat consistent results.

After 20 minutes of baking I pulled the whole wheat bread out and stuck it on a rack to cool briefly.  It was fully risen but just barely turning golden on top.  Then into plastic bags and into the freezer, and I'll see how I did later in the week!

Meanwhile my rye bread was doing its usual long, slow rise.  This was the third time I've made it and the first one was by far the best.  I'm starting to think that this is purely because I cut the caraway in the second two loaves.  It's possible that the delicious flavor I associate with rye bread is just caraway, caraway, caraway.

Finally, I also made pretzels with real lye again last week.  Last time I failed to understand the difference between parchment paper and wax paper and melted my wax paper to the pretzels.  This time around I had a silpat and used that.  The result was a real, proper lye pretzel: