Scandinavian Rye Bread From Our Friend Erika

Brighten up your breakfasts with this beautiful rye bread recipe from our super Scandinavian foodie Erika.

Rye bread is lower in gluten than white bread, keeping you fuller for longer...

 
Our notes: we toasted the seeds (and also used generous teaspoons) before we added them to the flour to bring out the flavour; take a small frying pan, get it very hot and add the seeds, no oil or butter, to dry roast them. Takes about 5 minutes and you'll need to stir continously to avoid the seeds burning. We also put this dough into a loaf tin and this has been very successful too - see last picture. Although our first batch haven't come out exactly like Erika's beautiful picture above, we will definitely make these again; practice makes perfect. The dough is much stickier than a normal loaf because of the addition of honey.

Erika's Scandinavian Rye Bread
Ingredients 
175ml water
175ml semi skimmed milk (or full fat when not on a diet)
250g whole grain rye flour
200g whole grain wheat flour
7g dried yeast
2 tsp salt
2.5 tsp mixed ground fennel, caraway seeds and/or aniseed 
100 ml dark Swedish syrup (can be found in Totally Swedish, or replaced with honey)

How to make:
- Add the rye flour, wheat flour, yeast, salt and seeds into a bowl. 
- Gently heat the water, milk and syrup (or honey) and work into the flour mixture. The dough should be sticky.
- Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave for an hour.
- Flip out the dough onto a floured surface and cut it into 6-8 equal pieces.
- Make each part into a round ball, flatten it gently and make an inch-wide whole in the middle, using your finger. The less flour you will add at this stage, the tastier bread.
- Place on baking trays lined with baking paper, cover once more with a tea towel and leave for another 45 minutes.
- Make dots in the bread using a fork and bake the bread the middle of the oven at 225oC for 15-20 minutes.
- Leave to cool on a cooling rack, covered with a tea towel.