Rúgbrauð – Icelandic rye bread

Ingredients for 2 loaves of bread

400 g rye flour
80 g wholemeal flour
200 g sugar syrup
1 packet of dry yeast
1 tsp salt
250 ml milk


Preparation

Preheat the oven to 200 °F (100 °C)C (upper/lower heat, not convection!).

Mix the flour with the wholemeal flour, sugar syrup, dry yeast and salt. Then pour in the warm milk and work everything into a sticky, tough dough.

Take two milk cartons, cut off the top and clean the cartons thoroughly and rinse with hot water.

Pour the bread dough into the milk cartons; the cartons should be about halfway full because the dough will still rise accordingly. “Plump up” the dough in the box a little so that as many cavities as possible are filled and no air bubbles form.

Then carefully cover the milk cartons with aluminum foil and then place them in the oven at 200 °F (100 °C) upper and lower heat for about 10 - 11 hours.

Then take the milk cartons out of the oven and let the bread cool before carefully removing it from the cartons. The Rúgbrauð is relatively sweet, a little sticky and tastes extremely delicious - perhaps a bit like pumpernickel.

The bread is spread with salted butter and served.

For example, we enjoyed the Rúgbrauð with cheese of the "White Stilton Blueberry" variety - even if it wasn't Icelandic cheese, but came from my favorite organic farmer, but blueberries almost always go with Icelandic cuisine!

Annotation:

Classically, the Rúgbrauð in Iceland is baked in tin cans in the hot earth for about 24 hours, and the result is impressive. For example, I ate wonderful "Geysir bread baked in the geothermal heat in the ert" in the Cow Café in Vogafjos on Mývatn .

Due to the lack of hot earth, you have to make do somehow - to get as close as possible to the desired result, you bake the bread in the oven at 175-200 °F (80-100 °C) for 10 - 12 hours.




[Translated from here.]