Dan Lepard’s Black Pepper Rye first swam into my consciousness in 2009, and I wrote about it shortly afterwards. It swam back into my consciousness a couple of days ago, and I realised I had never shared the recipe here. I’ve also adapted it a bit.
The method has an unusual twist that is actually not all that uncommon for rye breads. You boil the rye with the liquid, or pour hot liquid onto the rye, or …
We’re close to the Roman festival of Fornacalia, for which this site is named, so here’s my contribution. As befits a befuddled non-historian, the recipe is for cornbread, meaning maize, which the Romans knew not. I generally make cornbread only as an accompaniment to chilli, and so it was this time. The chilli was amazing, and the cornbread more than held its own.
I fancied something different, so returned to a loaf that I haven’t made in a couple of years at least. And in so doing I discovered that the images that accompanied the original post had gone missing. So, I’m going to shamelessly steal from myself and just copy most of that original post over.
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The Main Squeeze is partial to carrot cake. I am too. So when an occasion to celebrate rolled around, I went looking for a good recipe. There are thousands of them, many with an awful lot in them besides carrots. I had two considerations in mind. First, I didn’t want too big a cake. We’d never get through a three-layered tower of delight. Secondly, not too sweet, so anything that had more sugar than flour was automatically out. In the end I found one that was scaled for a loaf pan rather than a round cake tin and that didn’t seem too sweet. Of course it was written in American, so I translated the amounts to Sensible, made a few modifications and have no hesitation in claiming it now as my own.
There’s been nothing wrong with my bread lately. Far from it, all has been going swimmingly, which is why I’ve had nothing to share here. Who wants to read “another fantastic loaf” every week? But I have also been looking for a challenge, and an online recipe from a site new to me – aortafood – offered the challenge I was looking for: an almost 100% rye sourdough. ((2019-07-31: The site, alas, seems to have died. But it lives on in the Internet Archive, our own bit of heaven.))
Kasper Fogh, the editor of Aorta, says that this bread:
takes a bit of time and dedication in the beginning, but once you’re hooked, you’re most likely going to keep baking.
