It’s been way too long since I’ve blogged about anything. I’ve been quite busy, but things are a lot less hectic now, and I can focus on important things, like making pickles and baking bread. I had always thought caraway as a spice to use with rye sourdough bread, but this bread demonstrated me how well it goes with a lighter bread as well. I got the idea for this recipe from a little book about bread baking we checked out from the library – it’s called Leivo itse hyvää leipää and is written by Birgitta Rasmusson and Cecilia Lundin.
This is a very simple method for bread baking – no need to worry too much about kneading or shaping. This bread keeps well for a few days, stored in a paper bag that is wrapped in a kitchen towel.
This is what we used:
- 3 dl wheat bran
- 1 1/2 dl spelt flour
- 2 dl white wheat flour
- 3 dl whole wheat flour
- 1 tablespoon caraway seeds, crushed
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 4 dl water, warmed to about 37 °C
- 2 tablespoons muscovado sugar
- 25 g fresh yeast
- for decoration: about 2 teaspoons caraway seeds
I started by mixing the bran, the flours, salt, and the crushed caraway seeds in a bowl. Then I mixed the sugar with the water, and stirred with a fork until the sugar was diluted. Now I diluted the yeast into the water, crumbling it first with my fingers and then stirring with a fork. I poured the liquid into the bowl with the dry ingredients, and mixed it quickly into a dough. We spread the dough on a baking parchment placed on a baking sheet, and flattened with our hands until it was an evenly-shaped square, about 30cm x 30cm. Then we let it raise for 40 minutes.
The oven was set to 225 degrees Celsius. Before putting the bread in the oven, I sprayed it with some water and sprinkled caraway seeds over the top. I baked the bread for 15 minutes on the middle rack of our oven. Now the bread had browned just a little bit on the top, and I removed it from the oven and put it on a wooden rack to cool. Once it had cooled enough that I could touch it, I cut it into squares. We immediately enjoyed it with some soup.
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