In the bread bowl, they're sticky.

They take a long time to knead, and they don't rise quite so high. Why then bother making your own bread?

Answer: Rye-bread lovers do it for the tangy flavor, chewy texture and those tasty caraway seeds. They do it because baking one's own bread is satisfying. Just as gardening does, bread-baking connects us to the food we eat. 

I've been baking bread at least once a week for 36 years, but I'm a late convert to making rye bread, which I loved to eat even as a child. My mother wasn't a baker. She bought the bread at the local bakery.

I learned about souring bread from "The Tassajara Bread Book," a standard text among us back-to-the-landers in the 1970s. Tassajara No. 1 taught the sponge method of baking, which called for making up a sponge with all the liquid but only half the flour, letting that rise overnight and completing the process in the morning.

There are rye bread recipes that call for incremental steps over a 48-hour period, but that seems extreme. A 24-hour process will make a good sour rye loaf.

Because rye bread doesn't rise as much as wheat bread, it doesn't dry out as fast either. That gives rye bread the edge for still-fresh second-day eating.

Don't seal crusty bread up in a plastic container or plastic wrap until after the second day. You'll ruin the texture of the crust and you won't help the interior texture either. The traditional bread bag made of paper works better.

The great rye breads of my youth were a mixture of white rye flour and white wheat flour. White rye flour can be mail-ordered from King Arthur at www.kingarthurflour.com, but the cost is high.

My recipe, making a loaf both darker and denser, uses roughly 60 percent Hodgson Mill wholegrain rye flour and 40 percent unbleached white (wheat) flour.

I'm presuming I'm not the only person baking rye bread in Charleston. Kroger wouldn't give rye flour shelf space at several local stores if someone wasn't buying.

For years, I baked all my bread at 350 degrees. That was wrong, wrong, wrong, as the Gazette's editorial writers used to say. Artisan breads, it turns out, get their great crusts by starting at 425 or 450 degrees, then scaling back to 375.

If you bake bread regularly, buy yeast by the half-pound or one-pound package. If you use the sponge method, it takes only the tiniest bit of yeast to get the process started. Give yeast moisture, flour and time, and it multiplies quickly.

Bob Schwarz recently retired as a Gazette staff writer.

Whole-grain rye bread

 3 1/4 cups whole rye flour

 1 flat teaspoon yeast

 16 ounces water

 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 cups white flour, preferably unbleached

 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

 1 to 2 teaspoons salt

 2 tablespoons caraway seeds

In the evening, mix one cup rye flour with the yeast and 6 1/2 ounces water and stir into a thick mud. Cover and let sit overnight.

 In the morning, add more 1 1/2 cups rye flour and 9 1/2 ounces water, and stir, again giving you a thick mud. Then stir in the remaining rye flour, salt, oil and caraway seeds.  Cover until late afternoon or early evening.

Stir in white flour until the dough becomes too thick to stir. Then knead, adding white flour until the dough becomes just dry enough to divide into two loaves. (The dough will be stickier and require more flour in the kneading stage than a wheat loaf would.)

Put the loaves into oiled pans. Score with a sharp knife along the length of the loaf. Score across in several places. Let rise two hours at room temperature. If you're in a hurry, stick the bread in the oven for 45 minutes, bringing the temperature up to warm, then quickly turning it off.

Bake in a 450-degree oven 20 minutes, then turn down to 375 degrees for another 15 to 20 minutes. Take out when crust is brown and the loaf taps solid. A crusty bread is desirable, a dried-out bread undesirable.

Remove from oven, take breads out of pan and let them air dry on cooling rack or just lay the loaves crosswise across the rims of the loaf pans.