I was in Denmark on vacation this summer and was reminded about just how good freshly baked Danish rye bread (rugbrød) can taste - nutty, satisfyingly chewy, with a distinctively sour finish that lingers in your mouth. Great as the foundation of a myriad of open-sandwiches (smørrebrød), but also lovely for breakfast with just with a bit of butter and strawberry jam. 

In Copenhagen, I was especially impressed by the wonderful offerings from Meyers Bageri - not only for their fine breads and pastries, but more so for the philosophical approach to bread, and the break-making ingredients they sold on-premises: malt syrup, fresh-milled wheat and rye flours, live sour dough - pure and simple ingredients of high quality that anybody could buy for making their own fantastic breads at home.  

Meyers bageri in Copenhagen, items for purchase, "fresh flour" brochure

This got me inspired to revisit my own approach to rye bread making - could I make it easier and well adapted to ingredients available in North America? I wanted to find out. So, I spent a couple of months after my vacation back in Canada working things out - testing variations - and I am very happy to say that I have a new and improved technique for making Danish rye bread - one that I find is really easy to make and tastes super good - just like rugbrød in Denmark. 

So what is the secret? A healthy and active rye sourdough leaven that you use to make a sourdough starter. This is what imparts the sour character that is so typical of Danish rye bread. Although not hard to make, it takes some time to get going. But once its ready, you have the vital main ingredient to wonderfully complex breads. If you have access to fresh rye sourdough leaven, great! If not, you can find an excellent recipe with very detailed steps and photos here (from the Tartine Bread Experiment blog). 

My personal rye bread sourdough leaven

Once you have the leaven, you need to make your sourdough starter. Here's what you do the night before you plan on baking your bread:

• In a medium sized bowl, add 1 tablespoon of fresh leaven to 100ml lukewarm water, then stir in 100g rye flour. 
• Mix thoroughly, scrape the sides of the bowl clean, and cover.
• Let rise undisturbed overnight.
• The next morning, you have a bowl of sour dough starter and you are ready to go...

Danish rye bread ingredients, including sourdough starter (front)

 The rest is a snap. In terms of the qualities of ingredients, check this out...

And here are the steps for making your own Danish rye bread:

- Mix together all the dry ingredients in a big bowl

- Add the starter to the warm water and stir it up a bit 

- Pour the water over the dry ingredients and mix it all together thoroughly with a spatula or wooden spoon

- Transfer to a greased 9" x 5" loaf pan like this one (which I bought at Canadian Tire for ten  bucks)

- Sprinkle a tablespoon or so of sesame seeds over top of the loaf 

(See image below)

 

Danish rye bread steps continued:

- Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 3-4 hours in a warm place (until the dough rises a bit above the top of the bread pan)

- Put pan in oven, turn heat to 350F and let bake for 1 hour and 40 minutes, spritzing water into the oven periodically. 

Note: After about 1 hour, I cover the loaf with aluminum foil to keep the top from burning 

- Turn off heat, remove loaf from the pan and let cool in the warm oven for about an hour

- Remove from over, let cool completely, slice thinly with a good bread knife and enjoy!

Before and after baking - yummy golden delicious!

Regarding the ingredients: You can pretty much find all the ingredients in local grocery or specialty food stores, the one exception being the cracked rye (which can be trickier to find). If you can't find it, you can either buy whole rye and crack it yourself with a grain mill (which is what I do), or order it online, for instance from the Bob's Red Mill site here. 

For the mixed seeds, I use 30-30-10-10 % mix of sunflower, pumpkin, flax and sesame. But try different things as you please. 

Good luck with your bread! If you make it, I really look forward to hearing about how it goes. Here's how my most recent batch turned out...so delicious!

A slice of delicious Danish rye bread

My rugbrøod  video has been on Youtube for almost a year now, but I thought it might be useful to make it available on my blog as well. I hope you enjoy! 

Rye bread slicer

One thing about Danish Rye bread that used to drive me crazy...it can be a pain to slice, especially if you eat it all the time like I do! The dense, thick loaf practically requires a saw and a burly lumberjack just to hack it into rough-hewn pieces. And yet, the Danes use this bread sliced thinly, with near surgical precision, as the base upon which they build their delicious smørrebrød sandwiches. I used to wonder how they did it!

I should have known that the Danes had solved this little problem with an ingeniously medieval-looking device called a rugbrødsmaskine. This device, which could serve many a nefarious purpose from the looks of it - is used in Denmark for quickly and easily slicing Danish rye bread. And what a joy it is!

Check out this video of my rye bread "guillotine" in action!

I imagine you can still find these cool kitchen devices today in better Danish kitchenware shops, but I found mine at a Danish flea market. It cost me about 100 kroner (about 20 bucks) and has been worth every penny!

A company called Raadvad, which today is known primarily for its knives, has been making this device since the late 1800's. Check out their web page for an amazing picture of one of the originals - it's hardly changed in over a hundred years!!! 

I love a good tartarmad as much as anybody and have already posted about the traditional way of preparing it, but I've been stricken with the uncontrollable urge to explore non-traditional variations of classic smørrebrød, and wanted to share a recent discovery with fans of Danish Sandwiches!

A delicious treat for lunch and day of the week!
Just looking at it now makes my mouth water!

First of all, I have to acknowledge Aamanns restaurant in Copenhagen as the source of this new tasty treat. I was perusing the various blogs with posts about smørrebrød and I came across a great post by some food-savvy tourists who were visiting Copenhagen and ended up spending some quality time at my favourite smørrebrød joint. In the blog, they went into painstaking detail on the many sandwiches they ordered, taking close-up photos of each. It is from one of these photos that found my inspiration.

One of the things I love about Aamanns, and its especially true with this sandwich, is how the various ingredients so thoroughly complement each other - texture, flavour, and appearance are all harmoniously in balance and wonderfully unified by the Danish rye bread. I also love the way Aamanns comes up with new variations on traditional themes in a way that allows the old and the new to co-exist together.

From a design & architecture standpoint, this is something I pick up on when I visit Denmark. Sure it’s a very old country with a rich history, but the people don’t live in the past – they are constantly updating their environment to bring the old and the new together in ways I find very cool. For instance, you can see many examples in Copenhagen where new modern structures (say the Metro system) stand in juxtaposition to the historic landmarks (say Kongens Nytorv), in a way that enhances the overall appearance. (This is just my non-scholarly opinion – there may be groups of design advocates out there who will want my head on a platter for saying this – who knows???)

Here are a couple of architectural examples of the old and the new living side-by-side in Copenhagen:

 

Metro system at Kongens Nytorv:
Pyramids provide entrance for lighting in undergound system

UNIBANK Headquarters, Copenhagen:
New modern architecture, part of its surroundings

OK, let’s get back to the topic at hand – something I feel a lot more comfortable bloggin about - a new tartarmad sandwich. You'll need:


Fancy tartarmad: What you'll need to make it

• Buttered Danish rye bread
• Chopped uncooked beef
• Creamy egg sauce (though egg yolks would be just fine, too)
• Cornichon
• Red onion rings
• Fresh tarragon
• Crispy sliced potatoes

Buttered Danish rye is the foundation upon which this great sandwich is built. Homemade is best, but don't let that get in the way of enjoying this masterpiece - store bought is better than nothing.

Chopped beef: It only takes a few minutes,
but watch your fingers! 

Chopped beef - When making tartar, you want to get a great piece of meet from an excellent quality butcher. Ask for something like flank steak or sirloin of you want something with a bit of fat (i.e taste). Use filet mignon if you want the ultimate in tenderness. You need about 200g for 4 sandwiches. Then you want to take that tasty meat and hand chop it with a sharp knife as finely as you can reasonably manage. Season with salt and pepper and refrigerate until ready to use.

Egg yolk or "Magic Sauce" - Egg yolk, with its rich velvety texture, goes so well with raw meat it's scary. Cooked egg yolks, on the other hand, don't work at all and are a very poor substitute for the real raw thing. And while I love eating raw egg yolks with tartar, some people get all weird about possibly poisoning themselves, so here are a couple of alternatives:

·    Quickly pasteurize the egg yolks in a double-boiler until they are warm, but not cooked. Careful that the yolks don’t seize up.

·    Whip up a batch of what my friends and I mysteriously call Magic Sauce – basically a rich custard-like mixture with a slight hint of mustard. Here’s my recipe:



The things you'll need for Magic Sauce...

Ingredients for Magic Sauce:

• 3 egg yolks, beaten
• 125ml whipping cream
• 1 heaping TBSP Dijon mustard
• Salt and pepper to taste

What to do:

1. Gently heat the cream until it is frothy and very hot

2. Pour a little bit of hot cream into the yolks, stirring constantly, to temper the yolks. This will ensure that they do not curdle when added to the rest of the cream.

3. Add the yolks into the rest of the cream and heat over a bain-marie while stirring constantly until the mixture has thickened (about 5 minutes).

Whip it good!

4. Remove from heat and allow the mixture to cool completely.

5. Add the mustard, salt and pepper and refrigerate until ready to use. It should have the consistency of mayonnaise.

Red onions, cornichon, tarragon, and crispy potatoes – These ingredients should all be readily available to you. If you want to be really fancy, you can deep fry your own potato slices, but my taste testers were more than happy to eat this sandwich topped with potato chips (use a good unsalted kind of chip from a company like Miss Vickie’s or Cape Cod)

Some Assembly Required

To assemble the sandwich, you simply spread out enough chopped up beef to cover the rye bread, add a dollop or two of “Magic Sauce” and cover artfully with the remaining ingredients. Enjoy with a cold beer, fork and knife!

This smørrebrød looks great, tastes great, and is easy to make. What more can you ask for!

Sommersalat: smoked cheese and radish marks the beginning of summer

When the weather gets warm and the gardens are springing to life, it's the time of year to start making the delicious veggie smørrebrød called sommersalat (which translates to, drum roll.....summer salad). This distinctly Danish treat pops up at picnics across Denmark when the sun comes out and the weather gets warm. Personally, I have fond memories of enjoying smørrebrød with sommersalat in the garden of one of my uncle's my summer cottages in Hornbæk, on the Zealand coast north of Copenhagen. On those summer occassions, when the entire family would gather for enormous smørrebrød potluck, we could always count on my cousin Dorte to bring along the sommersalat. Thanks, Dorte!

Making sommersalat is very easy, but it requires one special ingredient - an unusually-prepared Danish dairy product similar to cream cheese but with one huge difference - it's been smoked! Called rygeost (or smoked cheese), you can find this in all Danish grocery stores, but if you live in Canada, you need to make it yourself - which is, of course, what I do.

There's more than one way to
smoke a cheese...

I don't have a proper smoker on my back balcony, but I have been known to jerry rig my bar-b-q into a suitable system for adding a modicum of naturally smokey flavour to foods (eel, herring, mackerel, and of course, cheese). For rygeost, however, you have to use cold smoke, so you'll need a way of transporting the smoke away from to heat source and into a secondary container in which you place the cheese. Smoking cheese doesn't take too long, maybe 30-45 minutes, and should be done with a mildly scented wood (no mesquite or hickory - you ain't cookin' ribs, partner - I'd recommend maple or apple wood instead).

Peder S. Krøyer
Self-portrait 1899

Given the fact that you'll probably need to smoke your own cheese, making sommersalat has a Danish Degree of Difficulty of Peder S. Krøyer Medium.

P. S. Krøyer (1851 - 1909), was a Danish painter and one of the most prominent members of the Skagen Painters, a community of Nordic artists who lived and worked in the picturesque Danish coastal town of Skagen (pronounced skay-en) at the end of the 19th century. He's best-known for his paintings depicting beach life in the Skagen area, using a color palette that brilliantly captured the magnificent summer sunlight  that bathed Denmark's most-northerly tip in the late-afternoons. His most famous painting is probably "Summer Evening on the Skagen Southern Beach with Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer" which he painted in 1893.

Summer Evening on the Skagen Southern Beach
with Anna Archer and Marie Krøyer, 1893, by P.S. Krøyer. 

Read more about the Skagen Painters at the Skagen Museum website.

I've never been to Skagen, but I've always thought of it as the quintessential Danish summer vacation spot. It was to Skagen that my father and his four brothers would travel as children in order to escape the humdrum blahs of summertime in post-war Copenhagen (playing with rusty nails in the mean back alleyways of Sydhavn), preferring instead to frolic in the frigid northern waters at the confluence of the Skaggerak and Kattegat. Brrrrrrr.... On the other hand, Skagen beaches, like beaches in the other parts of Europe, are topless, so maybe the kids didn't mind the chilly water that much after all. If you'd  like to know more about tourism in Skagen, check this out. If you'd like to learn more about topless beaches, ask the internet.

Windswept beach at Skagen - a great place to eat sommersalat!

Inspired by the beach?

As I mentioned, I've never been to Skagen  - it is too far out of the way for a quick trip from Copenhagen (takes about 5 and a half hours to get there with a ferry ride to Ǻrhus - another place I've never been to - so I'd be able to kill 2 birds with one stone on this trip). For now I have to content myself with a lovely Skagen watch!
Ok, so this doesn't have anything to do with the summer, open-faced sandwiches, or sommersalat, but I like Skagen watches. The company is actually US-headquartered, but is run by a Danish couple, and they make ultra-thin, lightweight watches with typical Danish-design simplicity. Check out Skagen Denmark watches here. Believe it or not, I do not get corporate sponsorship for the contents of my blog posts. I just post about things I like for free.




Skagen - one place I'd love to visit - but it always seems too far!

 Anyway, now that I've successfully avoided talking about food for several paragraphs, and shamelssly flogging a few Danish brands, we should get back to making this week's pålæg sandwich topping - sommersalad. Yum! Smokey, crunchy, delicously creamy, but somehow light all at the same time!

But before we do, here's one last gratuitous plug for Denmark in the summer - where the days are long, the sun is warm, the sandwiches are topless, and so are the beaches! Life in Denmark can be so hyggelig!

Topless beaches & topless sandwiches
Ah! Summer in Denmark ain't bad! 

OK, here's what you need to know if you want to make your own sommersalat smorrebrød:

Ingredients for sommersalat

Ingredients for sommersalat

• 300 g rygeost (smoked cheese)
• 3 heaping tbsp mayonnaise
• 250 ml (1 cup) thinly sliced radish
• 250 ml (1 cup) chopped seedless cucumber
• 1 bunch chives, chopped
• salt and pepper, to taste
• A few slices of frizzy lettuce
• slices of buttered Danish rye bread

Instructions for making sommersalat

Sommersalat smørrebrød: a mini work of art on bread...

1) Combine smoked cheese and mayonnaise in a large bowl until mixed.

2) Add radish, cucumber, and chopped chives and then stir to combine.

3) Allow the mixture to sit in the fridge for an hour or so to let the flavours blend together.

4) Place a couple of heaping tablespoons of the sommersalat atop a slice of buttered Danish rye bread and then garnish with sliced radish and chopped chive. Enjoy with fork and knife and a crisp Danish lager. Skål!

Remember, if you can't find fresh cheese in your 'hood, you can always make it yourself. I won't go into it in this blog post, but you can basically get there with a yogurt machine and cheese cloth. Read about it here. Then all you have to do is smoke it. Lickety-split!

Chocolate smørrebrød anyone?

Everybody loves chocolate, right? And the Danes are no different. In fact, they love chocolate so much they eat it on open-faced sandwiches...for breakfast! Admittedly, it' mostly a thing kids do, but if you ever feel like indulging your inner Danish child, butter up a slice of Danish rye and eat it topped with a couple of thin slices of chocolate, and then go crazy!

Chocolate pålæg sent via airmail

Get this. In Danish supermarkets you can buy chocolate slices specially prepared for the purpose of placing atop bread! It is available in either a milk or a dark variety, comes thinly sliced, and is cut to fit perfectly on a half a piece of Danish rye bread. But don't worry, you can enjoy your chocolate slices on pretty much any kind of bread for that matter. This isn't exactly gourmet cuisine, so you can get away with murder here. Toasted english muffins, baguette, melba toast, heck croutons! Whatever makes you happy.

Homemade chocolate slices

But what if you are not in Denmark and want to treat yourself to a little slice of chocolatey breakfast heaven? Short of asking an uncle to send you a few packages in the mail (which is what I do), what are your options? Ah, worry not! You can make prepared chocolate slices yourself. All you need is some chocolate, a thermometer, and the technique I will describe in a moment. But first, I need to digress slightly...

All this talk of chocolate makes me want a cup of coffee. I, like many canadians of Danish origin, drink copious amounts of coffee (see per capita consumption data here for the main coffee drinking nations). And while there are many ways of preparing coffee - most of which I enjoy - I really enjoy coffee made using a Bodum coffee press. If you like coffee and haven't experienced this manner of preparing coffee, you have to check it out. And another thing, since the Bodum system doesn't keep coffee warm, many Danes also have a coffee thermos. I love these. They add a real "je ne sais quoi" - or a "det ved jeg ikke" as they (do not) say in Danish - to the morning breakfast table. Check out the classic Stelton thermos for a touch of retro Danish style.   

Bodum - Danish for great coffee...

   

Stelton: Great for keeping coffee warm!

   

Tempering Chocolate

Ok, now back to making your own chocolate slices for Chocolate open-faced sandwiches. The trick is to use tempered chocolate - chocolate that has been melted, cooled to a specific temperature and then heated slightly. This results in a chocolate that sets firmly and maintains a nice glossy sheen - just what you want when enjoying your morning breakfast! And it doesn't melt all over your fingers the second you touch it. Here is how to temper your chocolate and make pålæg:

• Things you will need: You will need an accurate chocolate thermometer for tempering chocolate and a non-stick, heat resistant surface to work on (I like silpat silicone mats for this).

• Ingredients: Start with about 500g semi-sweet bakers chocolate. If you are using chunks, you'll need to chop them up into small pieces. You call also use chocolate chips - but use dark chocolate. Milk chocolate can also be tempered, but requires a slightly different procedure (the temperatures are different). 

• Getting ready: Prepare a small double boiler by placing one small pot in another pot containing water, heat the water until it starts to boil, then reduce heat to a gentle simmer.

• Heating: Place about 2/3 of the chocolate into the double boiler and melt it until it reaches 45-47 degrees Celsius. You can go hotter, but then cooling takes longer.

Melt chocolate in a double boiler

• Cooling: Remove the chocolate from the hot water, and, bit by bit, stir the unmelted chocolate into the melted stuff until you reach 26-27 C. Adding unmelted chocolate helps cool the whole thing faster.  

• Heating again: Put the pot containing the chocolate back into the hot water and stir for about 30 seconds until the temperature reaches 32 C. Your chocolate is now ready to use.  

Chocolate, spread thinly

• Forming: To form the slices, use a spatula to spread chocolate thinly across the silicone mat and then create rectangular segments using a dull knife. Allow the chocolate to cool thoroughly and peel off the mat. You're ready for a saturday morning delight with the kids!

Thin chocolate layer, segmented into rectangles

What else do Danes do with Chocolate?

Canadian flødeboller

While chocolate on your open-faced sandwich may seem like a revelation, Denmark has another interesting chocolate specialty - called flødeboller. These delights are basically cookie topped with marshmallow and then dipped in chocolate. If you like the sound of this, you can find an approximation, albeit a poor one, in Canadian supermarkets - they are called Whippets cookies. As a child visiting Denmark, I always had an amazing time - mainly because my father and I would make a point of visiting one of the many old-time candy shops located on Strøget (the central Copenhagen walking street) to gorge on flødeboller in their many different  shapes and sizes - some plain milk chocolate, some coated in dark chocolate, some stuffed with marzipan, and some adorned with shredded coconut - so many options - as a kid, it boggles the mind. Just to keep you guessing, I have not included a photo, but you can check here for a Danish website with really authentic looking flødeboller. This is not my speciality, so I am leaving these to the experts. Enjoy!

 

Some smørrebrød are definitely easier to make than others, and this one ranks up there with the easiest while still retaining plenty of unique Danish character. What I am talking about is an open-faced sandwich made from dark buttered rye bread, thick slices of baked ham, and a generous dollop of a special element that transforms this otherwise ordinary lunch into one of Denmark's most popular smørrebrød.

Italiensk Salat

The special element is called Italiensk Salat, a quintessentially Danish sandwich topping that is almost always paired with ham (and occasionally sliced beef tongue). The name translates to Italian salad, and while I have searched for exotic origins to this name, the only explanation I can come up with is the fact that the salad and the country share at least one thing in common - the colours on the Italian flag. That is, if you think carrots are red.


Remembering my childhood, this was probably the first open sandwich I really liked. Some of the others  are considerably more potent-tasting and, as such, took some getting used to. For instance, many Danes (myself included) do not eat pickled herring until after they survive the adolescent years. With that in mind, for anybody who is looking to get into this form of cuisine, ham and Italiensk salat is the perfect place to start. On the Danish Degree of Difficulty scale it ranks as a Little Mermaid (Easy). Indeed, it is a popular choice for all ages.

Separated at birth? This popular sandwich garnish and
the iconic flag on the right are so similar that the
Danes named the garnish after the country. 

The trick to getting this simple open-faced sandwich just right is using the correct ham. I find that it is best to avoid anything smoked, as the smoke flavour can be overwhelming. Instead opt for a baked ham with subtler flavours. Thickly cut baked ham is definitely the best way to go here.

Here's what you need to know to make italiensk salat.

Ingredients

• 1 medium carrot, steamed and cubed
• 4 asparagus spears, steamed and cut into small pieces
• 1/2 cup of peas (frozen are fine), cooked
• 1 tbsp chopped onion
• 1 tbsp mayonnaise
• 1 tbsp sour cream
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• lemon juice and salt to taste

Instructions

1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
2. Allow to sit in the refrigerator for about an hour to allow the flavours to meld.
3. Serve on slices of baked ham and buttered Danish rye bread.

Ham and Italiensk salat - A true Danish classic!

In order to make Danish open-faced sandwiches, you need dark, dense rye bread generously slathered with butter. You can sometimes find decent rye bread in the super market (those of you in North America), however, this bread is often imported from Germany, and is never fresh. For the best flavour, nothing beats making the rye bread yourself. It's a bit of a production, but well worth it.

BTW, Danes have an expression to describe the ideal amount of butter to slather on your rye bread. It's called tand smør - or, literally, tooth butter. This equates to enough butter so that you can see teeth marks in the butter when you bite into it. Ok, so it may not be heart-healthy, and it may have gone out of style in the 1950s, but it's still soooo goood this way!

Tand smør: the best way to eat rye bread!

In any case, Danish open-faced sandwiches are known as smørrebrød in the Danish language. This translates roughly to buttered-bread, which I mention simply to underscore the importance of butter as an ingredient to a great open-faced sandwich.

Lucky residents of Copenhagen have many options for buying terrific, fresh baked rye bread. Reinh Van Hauen and Lagkagehuset (shown at left, in Christianhavn) are the most notable. The Danish pastries available at these locations are pretty tasty, too!

Making Danish Rye Bread

Danish rye bread is always made with sour dough, which gives the bread its characteristic tart flavour, and helps preserve the bread for much longer than regular yeast breads. Unless you have some sour dough starter on hand, you'll need about one week to make your own before you can make the bread.

Note that once you have sour dough, you can refrigerate it, meaning that for the second loaf of rye, you only need to allow yourself 2 days: 1 day for the prep and baking, and 1 day for the loaf to cool thoroughly!


About Rye
Rye is a kind of grass similar to wheat and barley. It is grown extensively as a grain crop in Northern Europe as well as in Canada, no doubt because it is a very hardy grain that is more tolerant to cold temperatures than other grains such as wheat. It is rich in soluble fibre (nice and healthy), and low in gluten (meaning that it doesn't rise well, thus the dense loaves). To make Danish rye bread, you will need rye in several different guises...

The many faces of rye

In terms of special equipment, I highly suggest the following:

• A professional 3L non-stick rye bread form (available from EVA in Denmark). If you can't get your hands on one, try to find a bread form that has a 3 liter volume. If not, you'll probably have to adjust quantities and baking time.
• A grain mill (shown at left). Cracked rye is basically impossible to find in shops.
• A stand mixer. Uncooked rye bread dough has the consistency of cement. A stand mixer will save you time and preserve your sanity.
• A rye bread slicer (below). Nothing beats these medieval-looking devices for getting thin, evenly sliced rye bread.

Old-fashioned, rugbrød bread slicer (a.k.a. The Guillotine)

Making the Sour Dough

• 300 ml Buttermilk
• 100 ml Water
• 250 ml (150g) Rye flour
• 100 ml (60g) Whole Wheat flour
• 1 tbsp Coarse salt to add into the dough
• 1 tbsp Coarse salt to sprinkle over dough to preserve

Instructions

1. Combine all ingredients, sprinkle with salt (which helps to keep unwanted bacteria out of the the starter as it "ferments").
2. Let sit in a covered container for 7 days in a dark cool place (not in the refrigerator).

Preparing the Rye Bread Dough

• 1 bottle light ale (about 300ml)
• 2 tbsp malt syrup or honey
• 2 tbsp kosher salt
• 500 ml warm water (not above 100 F)
• 1 tsp dry yeast
• 750g Rye flour
• Sour dough

Instructions

1. Dissolve the yeast and a bit of sugar in 100ml of the warm water. Let stand for about 5 minutes until the yeast is frothy.
2. In a stand mixer, combine all the ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Baking the Bread

• 500g cracked rye grain
• 250ml warm water
• 150ml raw sunflower seeds and/or flax seeds (optional)
• Sesame seeds to cover loaf
• 1 tsp coarse salt (for the new batch of sour dough)

Instructions

1. Remove about 200g of the dough and put aside in a sealed container. This will be your sour dough for the next batch of bread. Sprinkle a teaspoon of coarse salt over the starter to preserve. 
2. In the mixer combine the remaining dough with the other ingredients and mix thoroughly (for about 5 minutes).
3. Place the well-mixed dough into a rye bread baking form (shown at left), sprinkle with sesame seeds, and let rise for at least 6 hours so the sour dough can impart its acidity.
4. Place the baking form in an over preheated to 350F and bake for 2 hours. For best results, spray water into the oven every 30 minutes or so.
5. Turn off the heat, remove the bread from the baking form, spray with water on all sides and place back in the over directly on the rack for about an hour while the oven cools.
6. Remove bread from the over and allow the bread to cool completely. This will take a couple of hours.
7. Once cooled, wrap the bread in plastic wrap place it in the refrigerator for at least 1 day before cutting the bread. Ideally, you should use a rugbrød slicer to get even, thin slices.
8. The bread's taste improves after a few days and stands up very well to freezing.
9. Enjoy with your favourite open-faced sandwiches!

"Delicious!"