In Denmark the foundation of the local cuisine is rye bread. It is similar to German schwarzbrot. When I lived in Sweden as a child, I remember that we brought back boxes of rye bread loafs. They also eat a lot of rye bread in Sweden, but a hard baked variety called knäckebröd, just as coarse, fiber-rich and healthy as Danish rye-bread, but with a very different texture. The meaning of the Swedish word is cracking (or breaking) bread. The reason we eat rye up here is that it really is to cold and moist to grow proper wheat.
As you can see below it is what you call a wholemeal bread, and no one has ever been able to put a finger on its qualities as a good and healthy fare. I have written about the rye bread before and I even mention it in this post about white bread.
I have been in rather incapacitated state with a sore foot and have not really been much good in the kitchen (or elsehwere). But now that I can limp around a bit I have baked some rye bread.
The recipe is simple:
500 ml water
500 ml stout
500 ml whole rye grain cut in half.
1000 ml coarse rye flour
salt
4-5 spoons of flaxseed
500 ml sourdough (taken from the last dough you made)
and a couple of days...
The first day is simple. Just add the whole grains to a bowl, add the water and the beer and let it rest for 24 hours. In that time the grains will soak the liquid and become softer. You can use the strong heavy Danish stout called, porter, or the lighter British sort (like for example Guinness).
Next day you add the sourdough. Rye bread is best with the rich, acidy aroma.
The sour dough is just about 500ml of the dough from the last bread. Kept in the fridge it evolves just slow enough to be ready for the next bread. In larger families with teenage boys I know people who have two sour doughs running at the same time to be able to satisfy the demand. But I get along with this jar. When the dough has evolved it becomes slightly reddish as you might be able to see here.
Stir and let it rest for a while.
Then you add the wholemeal rue flour. You do not need to knead the dough as it contains almost no gluten. but it has to be mixed thoroughly, a hard job with this dense, sticky, and heavy dough. My father in law had the black smiths of his working place make him a special rye bread kneader which he put in his power drill. I manage with a spoon :)
this is what it look like some where between overcooked porridge and cement... closest to cement actually. The small jar with the spoon is the top of the sourdough which i normally cover with a generous layer of salt to prevent mould. When you bake regularly it is no problem, but if you are away for a couple of weeks... maybe it could become mouldy. Now before I add salt I fill the sourdough jar with the new dough and put it in the fridge. Then I add salt and the salty sour dough. (sour dough grow faster if you don't add salt.
After having added the salt i let it rise for most of the day. Then I put it in a steel pan. The bread can be baked both with or without a loaf pan, but the square is considered good for Smørrebrød so here we go...
Danes these days seems to fancy rye bread with all kinds of outlandish seeds like sunflower seeds and such, but I only use flaxseed and only in the top crust.
To embed it in the bread and make sure it doesn't fall of if use a chopstick to mix it into the upper layer of the dough. Then i smotth it with some water and let rest again. It needs to rise about a quarter more.
The bread is baked in one and a half at hour 180 C. You can start eating it as soon as it is cooled, but the crust will be very hard and the bread a bit sticky. Most people let it rest covered in a damp cloth over night.
Here's a slice of the finished bread.
Vernünftiges Brot !
Haha, yes, I guess it is.
I love Rye Bread but I never know how to make them since the ingredients are expensive and even where I live, they are expensive too. After seeing that, it seems simple enough to make one. Who knows, that's something that I'll be trying in my next cooking lab :D
Yes, sometimes the ingredients can be from far away. I want to cook some Nigerian soup, but I will have to find some of the ingedients on the internet. I am sure they are dead cheap in Nigeria where they grow. Here Rye is cheap as it is good in this cold and wet climate.
I have been making sourdough bread for a while now, because I miss my German bread living here in the US. It tastes great! So much better than the bread I get in supermarkets here. But I haven't tried 100 % rye bread yet. Your bread looks exactly like the one I always used to buy back home in Germany - yum yum yum! Funny though, I always associated Denmark with the white bread 😃😃
Thanks for the recipe. Now to find the rye berries...
Cool :) I make sourdough bread also from wheat, and only in periods of weakness and decline do I succumb to yeast. The Danish black bread is less sweet than the German and is eaten in another way, buttered and with a very wide range of toppings, but the North German Schwartsbrot is indeed similar. I saw a recipe for Holsteiner Schwartsbrot and it was very similar to mine (Holstein is old Danish land, lost in the mid 1800 to Bismarck's aggressive policies).
In historic times white bread was a luxury here, oats, barley and rye are the types of grain that fits this cold and wet climate the best. But today you can of course buy as much wheat as you like - tradition just deem it unhealthy, so you will say to your children, You have to eat your rye bread to get big and strong :)
I looked around your profile, I like your drawings! Maybe you will also be interested in my daughter's manga style drawings. She's @scarlet-rain.
Your daughters manga drawings are wonderful, she is very talented.
Since I posted my drawings here, I moved on from manga, but as you have seen I haven't posted many of my paintings, well, I haven't posted in a long time. Time to change that 😃.
Uhh. Ser godt ud :D
Ja, det er efterhånden blevet meget godt.
Delicious ❣️
Thanks.
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