Lars, when you add cream you add fat to the recipe which was not there before as well as the milk solids, which usually results in a softer crumb, more like sandwich bread.

If you did everything else the same, I think I'd blame it on the cream. I've occasionally substituted orange juice for some of the water but never tried any milk or cream, as that does change texture.

Annie

One of the chief characteristics of rye flour in bread is a really sticky dough, even with the proper amount of hydration. When the dough is sticky, we tend to add more flour, and often add too much flour during kneading, trying to get the dough soft and smooth like white bread dough.

In the world of bread, dense bread usually means too much flour has been added, especially if it was a stiff dough. But let's also look at what happens from fat AND when the fat is added, because that has a cause and effect as well.

Since the cream is high in fat (and I assume there was other fat in the recipe), adding it early in the mix will coat the gluten so it develops in short strands. This is the same method we use when adding fat to flour when making pastry. Where the fat coats the flour, water can't penetrate it and the gluten develops in short strands. The fat "shortens" the gluten - hence, short crust pastry.

When fat, and large amounts of fat, are added early in the mixing, you will get a close crumb and not as much loft because of the shortened gluten strands.

Adding fat late in the gluten development (towards the end of the kneading), you will get an open crumb and higher loft.

Adding fat early in the mixing is how you get a close grained crumb for sandwich bread (so fillings and spreads don't drip through it). Adding fat late is how you achieve an open crumb for toasting (so the butter and jam have lots of pockets to fill). You can make the same enriched bread recipe and add the fat early in one loaf, and add the fat after the gluten has developed in the second loaf, and you will see a completely different size, crumb, and loft - even using the same recipe. It's not about what's right or wrong, but what kind of grain we want the bread to achieve according to how it's going to be used.

You listed the amounts of flour in the recipe, but did you add more flour during kneading due to the stickiness of the dough? As always, only add enough flour to make a well-hydrated soft dough, and always consider the amounts of flour in the recipe as a good (or bad) guess, and you have to go by that often elusive "feel" of the dough, not the amounts of flour noted in the recipe. Rye bread is an additional challenge because the dough will remain sticky, even with the correct hydration.

TIP: Add the high-gluten white flour and VWG a little at a time to your liquid first, and give it a really good workout between additions. Mix it with a Danish Dough Whisk (the perfect tool for making batters and doughs), or a wooden spoon if you don't have a Danish Dough Whisk, in order to work and develop the gluten during mixing. This is the best time to develop the gluten in a recipe with a mix of high-gluten and low-gluten or gluten-free flour/s. It may take two hundred (or more) strokes to develop the gluten while mixing, and mixing is a critical step where people get a little lazy and often fail to do a good job. If your dough is a shaggy mess when you start kneading it, it wasn't mixed properly.

Add the low-gluten flour last, after you've done a good job of mixing the high-gluten flour in the mixture. Add only enough flour to make a soft dough. You should only require a small amount of additional flour during kneading if you did a good job of developing the gluten during mixing.

There are a few tips for kneading rye bread due to it's stickiness:

-Save some (or all) of the fat/oil in the recipe and oil your hands during kneading so you don't add too much flour.

-Have a bowl of water handy and dip your hands into water during kneading, instead of adding more bench flour. It's always better to err on the side of a wet dough than a dry, stiff dough, and the wet hands won't stick as much to the dough, and will add a little hydration. The wet hand method is also good for kneading dough for English Muffins. A wet dough is what makes the characteristic holey texture in well-made English Muffins (but I digress).

-Knead the dough on a Silpat (or other brand of silicon mat) because you won't need any, or very little, bench flour. Dough doesn't stick to the mat. If you don't have a Silpat, spray your counter with PAM cooking spray instead of using bench flour.

-You can also place the dough in a gallon freezer-style zip-lock bag (the freezer bags have thicker plastic than the storage bags - a good thing). Press out the air and zip it shut. Knead the dough through the bag. If you need to adjust the hydration of the dough, you can still open the bag and add flour. When you are done kneading, turn the bag inside out to get the dough out. This is one bag you will toss in the trash because cleaning it is nearly impossible.

-Get a pair of kneading gloves (aka dough gloves).

Alcohol does not form gluten when it's mixed with flour like water does. It's used in pastry recipes so a little more liquid can be added to make it easier to roll-out so it doesn't crack, without over-developing the gluten strands from adding more water to achieve the same moisture level, which results in over-developed gluten and tough pastry. I suspect it does the same thing in your pancake batter.

Beer in bread is mainly for the flavor. If you add a low-alcohol or alcohol-free beer to a bread recipe, you will get a completely different flavor, interestingly enough. Is your beer bread recipe a quick bread or a yeast bread? Typically, they are a quick bread, and the alcohol would be beneficial because quick breads are another bread we don't want a lot of gluten-development.

-Grainlady

Thanks! I guess you said it all, and I will save this information for future reference. I made the bread in the bread machine, and so all the ingredients were dumped in together. However, I always mix the dry ingredients together before adding liquid, and the yeast is added last - by a dispenser in the top of the machine.

The bread as it turned out is perfectly good for sandwiches (which is what I made it for), but because it is so dense, I am slicing it thinner, and that is okay. I don't usually have time to make bread by hand, although I used to do that frequently, and I may go back to that method for special recipes.

I am wondering if I could make a batter with the liquids and the high gluten flours first, beat them a bit, and then put that into the machine with the other flour. That might be an interesting experiment to try. I've been making pumpernickel bread in the machine as well, and it has turned out lighter than the last rye bread that I made, but still denser than the other breads. I like rye flour a lot, but I might try cutting back on it a bit. The recipe called for 1-1/8 cups of rye flour, and I increased it to 1-1/4 cups, and so that may have been part of the problem.

The beer bread that I make is a yeast dough, and the recipe does say that the beer is there for flavor only. I might want to try a quick bread with beer because I have a large bottle of beer in my fridge that I would like to use up. I had been saving it for tempura, but I have my deep fryer stored away right now, waiting for cooler weather.

Thanks so much for your detailed response! I will print it out and store it with my bread recipes, especially the rye ones. I make three different kinds of rye bread on a regular basis.

Lars