Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Country and rye bread

Friday, March 14th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Another favourite white bread of mine is the country bread. I suspect that the one that you can buy in bakeries is made on sourdough, but the recipe book I have is without a sourdough starter for the bread. The dough is slightly sticky, but otherwise elastic and fun to work with. I had not quite counted on how much this bread rises during fermentation, so I had to transfer it to our largest bowl during the process, and it almost rose out of that as well!

This is what it looks like after it has been kneaded, fermented, and folded.

The oven rack is just as big as the plate, so it has risen nicely after being folded.

The bread’s crumb is slightly elastic and with a moist freshness to it that one can also find in the country breads in our local bakeries. This is very much a bread I might make again.

Now for something much, much, much more serious… the Danish rye bread, rugbrød.

This cultural psychosis…

Let me try again. These traditional breads are much adored in many Danish homes due to their high richness in fibre, their solid texture and their slightly bitter taste that goes well with some of the Danish traditional foods, liver paté (with jelly and salted meat, or with beetroots), or any kind of weirdly mixed herring. I am not a great fan of rye breads, much preferring the delectable white breads of Italy and Spain, but I digress.

My wife had run out of commercial rye bread yesterday, so since I was baking anyway, I offered to try to put together a sunflower seed rye bread (which she is rather partial to). So without further ado, I present to you a good, Danish rye bread.

The bread is a tad darker once the excess flour has been brushed away, but this is basically the gist of it. Now, those of you who are from Denmark or have visited Denmark and are used to the much, much darker rye bread that you can buy in grocery stores and bakeries, might ask why mine has turned out so light. This is what rye bread looks like without (artificial) browning. Granted, there are some rye breads that are darker than this as they use less wheat flour, but I have never seen a bread baked without browning that comes anywhere near what you can buy commercially.

Now I just have to make up with myself whether I want to taste it to verify my wife’s assertion that it tastes well, but that would mean abandoning one of my childhood vows to never eat Danish rye bread again unless I was served it while dining out. Such predicaments.

Tags: baking, bread, rye bread, whole grain bread

Ciabatta and Swiss country bread

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

So these past few weeks I have mainly been baking wheat breads without any coarser cereals, but to ramp up our fibre intake, I found a recipe for a brown bread, the Swiss country bread, which is about one third rye flour and two thirds wheat flour (no reason to go overboard with a full rye bread). It is a fairly easy bread to make, but its dough is extremely sticky and it took quite a while to clean up the kitchen utensils.

The other bread I baked today is a long-time favourite of mine, although this is the first time I have tried to bake it, the ciabatta bread. It is made on a preferment that sits on the kitchen counter for about twelve hours, to that you mix Italian tipo 00 wheat flour, salt, olive oil, and water, and presto, a few hours later you have some delicious ciabatta breads. The recipe I followed gives a slightly crispy crust and a firm crumb. Very delicious with salmon. It is another ciabatta bread and a Swiss country bread that, more or less, can be made out in the background.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread, whole grain bread