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Latvian Sourdough Rye Bread ("Saldskaaba Maize")

Latvian Sourdough Rye Bread ("Saldskaaba Maize") — a community recipe on Potlikkr.

Ingredients

• 3.5 cup Apple Cider
• 1.0 tbsp Apple Cider
• 2.0 tbsp Caraway Seeds
• 5.5 cup Whole Grain Rye Flour

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Method (preview)

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   This recipe is for one of my all-time favorite breads, but it involves a two-day process and is a lot of work. This bread is a "sweet & sour" type of sourdough rye. It's a heavy but very hearty bread -- good with soups, meats & cheeses, cucumber & tomato slices, or just plain butter. It's a peasant bread which was originally mixed up in a special wooden container called an "abra," using a wooden spoon devoted solely to mixing this type of dough, and also lots of elbow grease for kneading. My father once said that the mixing and kneading were often delegated to children, I suppose to keep them busy. I've run across a few published recipes for this type of bread, but the recipes were very imprecise and my results were disastrous. I finally consulted a couple of very generous older Latvian women about their recipes. My result was to borrow ideas from both of them and then to adjust for modern technology using a Kitchen Aid mixer to do the nasty heavy stuff. The peasant version of this bread was baked in brick ovens, but my regular electric oven works quite well. I make this bread infrequently, but always in large batches (6 loaves at a time, using 3 Kitchen Aid bowls); the recipe below is for a single batch (2 loaves). The bread freezes well if well wrapped in plastic bags; frozen loaves of bread can be thawed and then warmed up in the oven before serving.

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