I have long been a huge fan of rye bread, particularly after seeing Nigella chow down on her version of a “Hungarian sandwich” which is basically a dark rye bread smothered with dark cherry jam and a luscious amount of cream cheese. Because she does it and looks that amazing, I sometimes feel I can get away with the same too, but honestly, I look nowhere near as good as her!
Closer to home, a local bakery used to make a beautiful rye bread for some time, but then ultimately stopped as I believe I was their only buyer. And the longing for good rye bread in India had me fidgety. Sattvic Foods has organic, fine light rye flour which works beautifully in this recipe. As mentioned before, I have been miserably failing at all bread attempts, but for the first time I achieved success in the first go of this recipe. I have made this bread multiple times since, and each time it is a sheer delight. If you’ve never made bread before, I highly recommend to start with this one!
Recipe adapted from BBC Good Food.
The RecipeServes 6
Ingredients
200g Rye flour
200g White flour
7g Active-dry yeast
1 tsp Salt
1 tbsp Honey
1 tsp Caraway seeds (ajwain)
Butter
Fresh rosemary
Instructions
Tip the flours, yeast and salt into a bowl. In a jug, mix the honey with 270ml warm water first, pour the liquid into the bowl and mix to form a dough. Rye flour can absorb lots of water, if the dough looks too dry add the remaining 20ml warm water until you have a soft dough.
Tip out onto your work surface and knead for 10 mins until smooth. Rye contains less gluten than white flour so the dough will not feel as springy as a conventional white loaf. The dough will be sticky!
Place the dough in a well oiled bowl, cover with cling film and leave to rise in a warm place for 2 hours, or until roughly doubled in size.
Dust a 2lb/900g loaf tin with flour.
Tip the dough back onto your work surface and knead briefly to knock out any air bubbles. Work the caraway seeds into the dough. Shape into a smooth oval loaf and pop into your tin. Cover the tin with oiled cling film and leave to rise somewhere warm for a further 1 – 1.5 hr, or until doubled in size.
Heat oven to 220C. Remove the cling film and dust the surface of the loaf with rye flour. Slash a few incisions on an angle then bake for 35-40 minutes until dark brown and hollow sounding when tapped. Transfer to a wire cooling rack and leave to cool for at least 20 mins before serving.
Serve warm with butter and fresh rosemary.
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