| Rye %: | 51% |
| Stages: | Scald, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 4-4½ hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 30 minutes |
| Yield: | Three 1¾ lb/800 g loaves |
One of the breads I discovered on Baltic Rye Tour 2018 was this simple and lovely Finnish malt bread. I first tasted it at the Wi-Box Bakery in Raseborg, on Finland’s southwestern coast, where Swedish influence is very strong. It was an immediate hit, not just with me, but with all 18 members of our jolly band of bread nerds.
| Rye %: | 90% |
| Stages: | Sourdough sponge, Scald, Scald-sponge (Opara), Yeast sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 24-30 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 45-50 minutes |
| Yield: | One 3¼ lb/1.46 kg loaf |
My weakness for Baltic rye breads took over when I found this recipe in a Polish blog. Just to set the scene, Palanga is a coastal resort in western Lithuania, on the shores of the Baltic whose white sand beaches attract tourists from all over Europe, especially Poles and Germans. I suspect that this bread, which is lighter in both color and flavor that the other Baltic ryes I’ve encountered, is intended to appeal to the tastes of the town’s economically important summer visitors. Instead of the wholegrain rye flour that’s commonly used in Baltic breads, this one uses Type 1150, a much lighter blend that can be approximated by mixing 2/3 medium rye and 1/3 white rye.
by John Melngailis – Partner, Black Rooster Food, LLC
NOTE: I first met John Melngailis at Bread Furst, James Beard winner Mark Furstenburg’s Washington DC bakery. Mark had been kind enough to arrange for me to appear at the bakery to publicize The Rye Baker, and invited John, whose love of his native Latvian rye breads prompted him to found Black Rooster Food and start baking them commercially. Needless to say, John and I hit it off immediately, spending a good part of the morning talking about the marvels of Baltic rye. He was also kind enough to bring me a loaf of each of his breads — dense, sweet-sour rupjmaize, and a triangular loaf of his fruit-and-nut holiday bread, both of which were extraordinary. So when John sent me this essay on his relationship with the bread he loves, I simply had to share; it’s a fascinating read.
| Rye %: | 100% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Scald, Scald-sponge, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture |
| Start to Finish: | 11 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 40-50 minutes |
| Yield: | One 2¼ lb/1.0 kg loaf |
I’d been meaning to make Vitebsk Rye for some time – ever since I found it in Mike Zhuravel’s magnificent Russian-language bread blog, O Khlebye. The result made me wonder why I’d waited so long: this is a truly splendid Belarusian rye bread.
| Rye %: | 100% |
| Stages: | Sponge, Scald, 2-Stage sponge-scald |
| Leaven: | Rye sour culture, Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 28-32 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 45-50 minutes |
| Yield: | One 3.15 lb/1.40 kg loaf |
Latgalian Rye is one of those complex Baltic breads I’d been meaning to make for some time, but life, as usual, got in the way. Finally, having found the time to devote to this flavorful, technically interesting Baltic rye, I took the plunge.
Like other Latvian rye breads I’ve eaten, this one features a dark, chewy crust, close yet tender crumb and distinctive sweet-sour flavor profile. Likewise, the use of multiple pre-doughs, including not just a sponge, but also a scald and two sour-scalds, produce enormously complex and nuanced flavors.
| Rye %: | 36% |
| Stages: | Scald, Final dough |
| Leaven: | Instant yeast |
| Start to Finish: | 4½-5 hours |
| Hands-on Time: | 20-30 minutes |
| Yield: | Two 2¾ lb/785 g loaves |
Thinking about my third and final holiday bread for 2016, I decided that I wanted something halfway between the savory Christmas Crispbread and sweet Bavarian Ketzapiren I’d already posted. This Hazelnut-Fig Loaf immediately came to mind. Like many Finnish Christmas loaves, this one is based on a mixed wheat-rye dough, sweetened with syrup and enhanced with the sweet-bitter notes of roasted barley malt. What sets this one apart is its use of chopped figs and hazelnuts, sunflower seeds and coarse rye meal. All of these combine to produce a coarse, complex mouth feel that plays beautifully against an equally complex flavor profile of understated sweetness, nuttiness, coffee and subtle sour.
Not long ago I was surprised and pleased to find myself, my new book (The Rye Baker) and this blog mentioned in a Washington Post food article titled “Why are some rye breads scalded?” By way of defining a scald, the author posted a link to the British blog Virtuous Bread that describes the how-tos of scalding and concludes – rightly so – that the technique produces a “gorgeous bread” with a crumb that’s “soft and chewy as if there was a lot of fat in it.”
From my point of view, the article was a very good start, but only part of a more complex and nuanced story.