Bread Baking Babes: We go to Sweden with rye!

There is something entirely tempting about the combination of rye, caraway and honey. Add in some oranges and anise seeds and there you have our March challenge for the Bread Baking Babes.  Astrid in her capacity of Kitchen of the Month took a recipe from the Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe,  mentioned the word “rye” and had us scrambling for the pantry. I think almost all of us love to bake with rye as difficult as that flour can be sometimes.

This particular bread is described in the book as "sweet-smelling and scented, a light bread suitable for sandwiches". Well I am not sure if a bread baked with quite the amount of rye can be put on the shelf as “light” but I surely agree with sweet smelling and fragrant.

Really, the caraway and anise (which I believe are emphasizing each other) make a lovely scented dough, adding orange zest to it takes it one step beyond.

The surprise with this bread is the different results our Babes produced, some breads came out nicely proportioned, behaved and stayed in shape, others went wild and got this fabulous crusty poof.

 

Maybe it’s the bakers’ hand, maybe free form vs. pan baked, maybe it’s the kitchen environment, maybe it’s the rye that differs from country to country. Dear fellow Babes: I think we need to have a Bakers Retreat, rent a cabin somewhere, bring our flours (and bottles!) and have a party compare notes.

My notes on this bread:

- first of all, we love any rye bread. Period.
- second, we love Swedish type bread. Period.
- the Husband is strangely enamored with orange scented bread.
- a sure winner?
- Funny enough we liked the bread as is, but we LOVED the bread toasted.
- somehow when toasted the flavours seemed to interact more and blend?
- btw; I baked half the recipe, and used a loaf pan to bake and steam in the first 20 minutes.
- Oh and… that crust is fabulous!

Buddy Bake along? Scroll down please!

You sure want to bake this bread as well, don’t you?

Please do so, you will not regret it. If you snap some pics and share your thoughts about this month’s bread on your blog Astrid will be more than happy to add you to the BBB Buddy round up on March 29th.  If you do not own a blog, no worries, you can also post your picture to Flickr or any other photo sharing site and share your thoughts there.

Since we are Babes and do not obey to rules, there are nearly no rules for Buddies, except these two:

1. Bake the featured bread, snap a pic & share your thoughts about how you liked it (or not liked it)
2. Send an email to the Kitchen of the Month to notify us and make it easier to write the round up.

Don’t forget to visit my fellow Babes and see what they did with this lovely Bread this month.  Check the right hand bar for their links. Please include Katie in your visit, she is our BBBBB (Bitchin’ Bread Baking Babe Bibliothécaire) who writes up such lovely round ups of all the BBB Breads every month!

Yeastspotted!

I send this over to Susan’s Yeastspotting.