Loaves & Fishes

Cleaning up after the holiday, I was putting away all of the different kinds of flour I'd been using and I just didn't have enough space in my already-cluttered-with-ingredients-and-cooking implements Brooklyn kitchen. The biggest problem with a large bag of rye flour, which I only ever used for one recipe. So I looked up a recipe for rye bread online and decided to give it a go. I was thrilled with the amount of flour it used, because it was going to make it very easy to put smaller bags away. Unfortunately, I didn't read the entire recipe until the end....especially the part where it said that the recipe made 5 LOAVES! It took quite a while, but they turned out pretty nice.

We made an enormous pasta salad with smoked salmon tips over the holidays, and we had a lot of extra salmon. A piece of salmon on some of this bread was very tasty.

Grandma's Rye Bread

2 Tbsp. dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 tsp. sugar

Let set for 10 min.

3 cups rye flour
2 Tbsp. salt
5 cups warm water
3 tbsp caraway seeds

Mix flour, salt, and water well. Stir in yeast mixture. Let stand overnight.

In the morning, mix:

5 cups warm water
12 cups white flour
Add to the first mixture. Knead until dough comes freely from hand. Let rise and then make into round loaves on floured pans.

Let rise until 50% higher. Brush with water, egg whites, or a bit of olive oil and sprinkle some caraway seeks on top. Bake 1 hour at 375 F Makes 5 good sized loaves.