- Black bread with butter at work
For the next installment of bread-a-week, I wanted to make Russian black bread. I used to use a recipe from Gourmet; it was contributed by a reader, so in the letters section at the front of the magazine. I remember making it when we lived in Chicago, so I estimated that it must have been in an issue dating from the early 1990s. Gourmet indexes those sent-in recipes on Epicurious now, but the coverage gets a little sketchy when you go back that far, and I couldn’t find anything by searching the collection online. I remembered that you cooked some finely diced onion in water and threw in seeds for flavoring – dill, fennel, caraway – and it had chocolate and espresso powder to make it black. I was starting to think I’d have to start rifling my old issues of the magazine, but Tuesday morning, bored in a meeting, I did a quick search on pumpernickel on my iPhone, and this from Deb at Smitten Kitchen was the 2nd hit. I liked the Smitten recipe, but on a whim, a few evenings ago, I decided to start looking at 1990s Gourmets from the stack on my cookbook shelves – and turned out that the recipe I used to use was Pumpkin Rye Bread Angerer, from the November 1990 magazine – the first one I picked up.
Naturally, once I had two recipes, I had to tinker. Deb’s has bran, which I didn’t want to go out & buy. Angerer’s has pumpkin puree, and I just happened to have a container of that thawed out in the fridge – since it’s May, using up last year’s stored produce seemed like a good idea. Deb’s recipe has molasses and vinegar – which seem crucial to me for black bread; Angerer’s not. Deb uses caraway & fennel; Angerer dill seed & fennel. In place of cooked onion, Deb uses raw (milder, sweeter) shallots – that seemed like a good idea. Deb mixes the rye, wheat and white flours together – I didn’t want to do that because I would potentially end up with unused mixed flours. Anyways, here’s what I came up with.
