Rye bread

     I made Scandinavian soda bread yesterday, and here are a few jpgs based on the round.  This type of bread features a few curious ingredients.  Guinness stout, for one.  There is also dark corn syrup, which you can see being heated with some grams of unsalted butter in the jpg above.  Rye flour I like to bake bread with and cannot give you a why explanation.  The reason may have to do with an associatan with lembas, the magical seeming food of Middle Earth, and that in turn evokes in my mind a dot link to manna, heaven's food during the Moses era.  Desert grain.  It does not seem like a particularly cherished bread in the Americas, because of it's strong rye flavor, I suspect.  Though my minds tells me that those who do indeed love to hold a pint of the black in one hand and a hot and steaming German bratwurst in the other, would utterly adore this bread.  My mind suggests it to me in certain terms being the least of one's worries.

   

    

     Now other substances exist in this bread.  Unbleached bread flour, unsalted butter, salt, water, yeast.  The amount of time taken in order to make this bread has absolutely no connection to its ingredients.  I did have to set my stopwatch more than a couple of times.  I did have to make a proof box out of my oven.  The climate cools in October, and summer has ended, a person tells me.  What better time to make Scandinavian soda bread.  For the matter of the bread, the crust, as it is described, is very soft.  Imagine a wet sponge, then imagine a soft wet sponge, additionally.  This morning, I cut a thick slice off of the bottom round and toasted it.  Light setting.  The surface still burned.  Butter balled up when I tried to spread a pat over the toast.  It does not toast well.  Then I tried Nutella, spreading a thin layer of this richness over the second slice.  I had sliced the slice in half.  That proved much smoother going.  The rye married well with the Nutella. 

     I dropped Babette's Feast into the Netflix queue this morning, next after Meek's Cutoff. This statement, I have a feeling, aptly explains my, to me, mysterious act of adding this jpg below, an image of boiled and salted overripe string beans, into a blog covering, among other things, Scandinavian soda bread.