Russian Dark Rye - Borodinsky Bread (after eatalready)
Russian Rye – Borodinsky Bread (after eatalready)
I discovered these aromatic, sweetish, malty breads when I started in the early 2000’s going kayaking with my kids the small, wild rivers in rural Baltics and Belarus. Grocery shopping on these rivers being extremely scarce and few and far between, we would hit small country mom and pop stores sometimes after a week to ten days from the previous one. Often the only bread they had was one of these dark rye, pungent, heavy, moist breads that, as we discovered, would easily keep two weeks with no refrigeration.
It took me many years to recreate these breads in my own kitchen, but I have succeeded and now I regularly make several different recipes. When I came across the recipe by eatalready, I immediately knew I had to try it. Needless to say, it was a total success!
I have made some adaptations to the recipe. I can read some Russian, so I went directly to the original Russian language post referenced by eatalready. Based on all this and the size of my bread pan, I have made some adaptations, most notably the types of flour, the amount of malt, sugar, salt, and yeast.
Below is my recipe and baking log for a 2.2 quart/2 liter Pullman pan:
Starter Refresh (1:4:4)
Starter Refresh (1:4:4)
Scald (keep 6 hrs at 150°F/65℃)
Stage 1 Leaven (1:1:1)
Stage 2 Leaven (1:1:1)
“Poolish”
Final Dough
Total Bread
|
Flour wash: ¼ tbs AP flour + 12 g water, stir well.
Starch wash: ¼ tsp starch + 35 g water, bring to boil while stirring.
Below is my log from this bake:
Action | Ambient temperature | Start time | Time to next action | |
Activate rye starter | 72°F | 22°C | 11:25 PM | 7:45 |
Start scald with boiling water, keep in oven at 150°F/65°C | 150°F | 66°C | 7:10 AM | 3:10 |
Activate stage 1 leaven | 85°F | 30°C | 10:20 AM | 2:40 |
Cool scald by immersing in bowl of cool water | 60°F | 16°C | 1:00 PM | 10 min |
Activate stage 2 leaven (with cooled scald) | 78°F | 26°C | 1:10 PM | 3:30 |
Activate poolish | 72°F | 22°C | 4:40 PM | 30 min |
Mix final dough | 72°F | 22°C | 5:10 PM | 15 min |
Bulk ferment until doubled at 85°F/30°C | 85°F | 30°C | 5:25 PM | 1:00 |
Fill baking pan |
|
| 6:25 PM | 2 min |
Proof at 30℃ | 85°F | 30°C | 6:27 PM | 35 min |
Preheat oven to 400°F/200°C |
|
| 7:02 PM | 0 min |
Continue proofing at 85°F/30°C | 85°F | 30°C | 7:02 PM | 26 min |
Brush w/ flour wash, sprinkle some coriander seeds in top |
|
| 7:28 PM | 2 min |
Bake 65 min at 400°F/200°C (to internal temp. of ca. 195°F) | 400°F | 205°C | 7:30 PM | 1:05 |
In the meantime boil starch wash |
|
| 8:15 PM | 2 min |
Brush with boiled starch wash |
|
| 8:35 PM | 2 min |
Done |
|
| 8:37 PM |
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Notes:
1. The original recipe omits the starter step and calls directly for what I called Stage 1 Leaven, bus since I keep only about 15-25 g of starter in my fridge (I bake 3-4 times a week), I had to first grow some more, hence this first step.
2. I kept the scald at 150°F in the oven. The same with the preferments and proofing done at 85°F. This is a bit trickier, while 5°F this way or the other makes little difference at 150°F, at 85°F it can make a bigger difference. I simply keep a lab thermometer in the oven and monitor/adjust the temperature as needed.
3. When I started preheating the oven, I moved my proofing to the laundry closet where my drier happened to be in use, I guess in the summer this would not be a problem, in the winter I would just look for the warmest place in my house.
4. In order to smooth the top of sourdough in a pan, I usually pour a quarter inch of water into the pan, pour it out immediately and then I can work the top of the dough easily with a wet spoon. For this bread, I wasn’t sure what the water on top would do to the final color of the crust, so I just used a wet spoon to smooth the surface. In retrospect I think water would’ve been ok on top of the bread for a few seconds. I put the bread in the oven while it still had a noticeable convex shape on the top surface. I think it’s better to underproof than overproof in order to keep the bread from collapsing (top caving in) in the oven.
5. I used pumpernickel flour, because I believe this is the closest to the unsifted whole rye flours/meals you would expect to find in Soviet era Russia. Feel free to use any other unsifted/coarse rye flour or fine/medium meal, I believe this will not make a whole lot of difference.
6. I used potato starch, because I believe this would be what would have been most likely found in old Russia. I believe corn starch should do the job as well, just use enough of it to make a sort of runny slimy goo when boiled.
7. While all this may seem a bit involved, I bake 3-4 loaves of varied types of bread every week and I have a system to make this very easy. I am pretty good in Excel, so I make simple, rudimentary spreadsheets for all recipes that help me adjust the amounts of ingredients, plan my bakes, and keep track of time. If anybody is interested, I can share them, but please bear in mind that they are by no means automated and you have to know what you are doing in Excel in order to really work with them. For those who have checked my math, you may have noticed a discrepancy of 5 g between final dough and totals, this comes from estimating the contents of my starters, like I have said, these spreadsheets are fairly simple and most of the time I don’t bother with differences in totals of less than a percentage point.
I think that is a perfect rye crumb. Excellent.
What is "spillage"?
Abe, by "spillage" I mean the amount of sourdough I expect either to not be able to extract off the walls of the container, or to be reserved for new starter to go into the fridge for the next bake. With high volume preferments "spillage" of 5 or 10 grams makes little difference, but if my preferment is 30 or 60 grams, I prefer to provide for some "extra" sourdough to be wasted or saved outside of the current recipe. Just my way of calculating my needs.
It was a funny google translation of a recipe in Russian.
One of the best Borodinsky Breads i've seen.
Bon Appetit. Or "priyatnogo appetita" (coutesy of google translate).
Thank you, or "Spassyba" :) (this is my own transliteration)
Is that "sugarbeet" root molasses or molasses from actual beets? If the latter, where do you buy "Beetroot" Molasses?
Sugar beet. It's hard to come by in the US, readily available in Europe, this is from where I have it. You can get some German brands on eBay either from Germany or the UK, but shipping is a bit pricey - I would say not necessarily worth it. The two popular brands you can find on eBay are Goldsaft and Horizon. If you live in a big city, you might have a German grocery store reasonably close, they might carry it. If you don't have it (I got a big jar once and it goes a long way), I would suggest to use cane molasses, I can't see why it would make a big difference, it's pretty much the same thing. I don't notice much of a detectable difference in baked goods, whichever one I use. I just like the thought of being as close to the original as possible, I think the difference is mostly in how I feel about using the same ingredients I imagine they would have used when they made those breads in the past.
You may not subscribe to the same idea, but personally, I am very relaxed (not to say indifferent) to substitutes. I used to follow recipes to the smallest detail, but when pressed from time to time for substitutes, I have eventually found that while you have to stick to the amounts (adjusted to suit the properties of the various ingredients), when it comes to ingredient substitutes you can be very creative; sweeteners, types of sourdough starters, types of flour, types of liquids can be exchanged rather freely - breads are quite forgiving as long as you follow the philosophy of bread baking - adequate hydration, adequate gluten, adequate relationship of leavening agent, time and temperature. Breads suffer retarding (I have once retarded an open crumb 30%rye/70% wheat with 20% soaker for 8 days and it did fine). My feeling is this bread will suffer cane molasses or even dark brown sugar with a bit of water just as well, with pretty much nobody being able to taste the difference.
Depends on the sub. Ya really can't sub out the Fermented Red Rye as it is truly unique in its chocolatey tartness.
I asked about the molasses because there are many different types of molasses from sources other than Sugar Beets and Sugar Cane. I would not have been shocked to find that there were "Beet" molasses.
I have grape, pomegranate and tamarind molasses in my pantry that I use from time to time in my Carrot pulp and Apple pulp muffin recipes.
Malt extract (just simple barley malt extract, nothing fancy) is the best substitute for the original type of "molasses", which is not actually molasses... Should be reasonably easy to get.
Ilya, I believe that beet molasses is actually a molasses. I believe that it is something left over after extracting white sugar from sugar beets and corresponds very closely to cane molasses, being something left over after extracting white sugar from sugar cane.
Now, barley malt extract I have never used, even though I always thought it was a kind of sweetener used in beer brewing and I would imagine it may be something in between (non diastatic) red rye malt powder and molasses. Am I wrong? What would you use it for? What flavor/quality does it give to breads?
Original recipes for breads like Borodinsky don't use beet molasses. They use мальтозная патока. It's similar to malt extract - starch, hydrolyzed using diastatic malt, produces a dark sweet thick liquid.
Some info from a manufacturer (so take the health benefits etc with a grain of salt, but the facts about it's properties in baking are correct, afaik).
https://pudov.ru/practicum/10_faktov_pro_maltoznuyu_patoku/
It's the malt version of corn syrup!
Ilya Flyamer, well, I stand corrected. I went off an original, i.e., a recipe based on the Soviet ГОСТ standard. Here it is: https://mariana-aga.livejournal.com/152489.html
And it calls for патока. Not мальтозная патока but just патока. This is what I found in Russian Wikipedia: Па́тока (декстринмальтоза, мальтодекстрин) — продукт неполного кислотного (разбавленными кислотами) или ферментативного гидролиза крахмала. Образуется как побочный продукт при производстве сахара и крахмала. Since my Russian is a bit rudimentary, I stopped reading at this point and went "molasses". Having now labored through the entire Wikipedia entry, I stand corrected.
So, can you please approximate a bit better on the мальтозная патока? What are the best substitutes, apart from the barley malt extract? Is barley malt extract liquid? Where could you actually try to procure some мальтозная патока, short of going to Russia?
Based on the Wikipedia article, патока is a synonym for maltodextrin, yet maltodextrin is obviously something entirely different. You seem to know a lot about this, are you Russian? Well anyway, can you explain a bit more about мальтозная патока, how/where to get it and what the best substitute would be. I actually have some Belarusian friends, do you think they could get it out of their old country?
P.S.
I am currently also getting antsy for another Borodinsky, this one: https://registrr.livejournal.com/16193.html, it calls for мальтозная патока as well, so now I am double interested :)
A.
Ilya Flyamer, "barley malt syrup" could this be it?
This is labeled as malt syrup, I guess it's the same as malt extract, a great substitute.
I am Russian, but not an expert on this. I learned a lot from Rus Brot on YouTube and his blog brotgost, highly recommend checking it out.
The main point is to add a lot of maltose. Maltose (and short glucose oligosaccharides) is highly fermentable and yeast prefer it over fructose-containing sugars (sucrose is a dimer of glucose and fructose, for example). So I guess any syrup produced by incomplete hydrolysis of starch would be a good substitute. Rice syrup, often used in Korea, comes to mind, it looks very similar to malt extract, with a slightly different flavor.
And yes, malt extract is liquid, мальтозная патока is also liquid. Very thick, sticky, and sort of stretchy. A bit like honey, but even more annoying to use :)
I don't think there is any reason to go to great lengths to get мальтозная патока. Malt extract is easy to get and works just as well, and generally it's the substitute. It's not identical (slightly different flavor and it's lighter in color), but it's important properties are the same.
I am sure your belorusian friends would be able to get some, but it comes in big heavy glass jars that would be annoying to transport... At least in Russia it can be ordered online easily though.
In the US, most supermarkets have malted barley syrup, and it's exactly what you describe - *very* annoying to use because it's so thick, sticky, and tenacious.
It's probably the same thing, yes.
Ilya Flyamer, you really got me going with your ideas. I went through the entire thread of your post here on long fermentation, I spent a lot of time since yesterday with Rus Brot, and got really interested in some of his breads. The one problem I have is CLAS.
Looking back at my baking history, I have just realized that this month marks the 43rd anniversary of when one bitterly cold morning of an upstate New York winter a friend showed me how to bake bread. I took to it like a duck to water and started baking several CY leaven wheat-based loaves every week. After a while I discovered rye and sourdough, became a kind of a sourdough zealot, shunning any recipes that included even a hint of CY. About six months ago I started with lighter, Tartine=style inspired breads. Nowadays I bake with both sourdough and yeast, as well as the combinations thereof. But CLAS? I can't see an advantage, even none of the "advantages" Rus Brot lists appeal to me in any way. But he makes some amazing breads I will have to try. But it seems to me, I should be able to recreate them just as well without CLAS and without such rigid temperature control with just my regular stiff, 50% hydration wheat starter. I just can't see my wife letting me take over enough additional counter space to stick a prooffer into our kitchen (I had been toying with the idea some time ago, but in the end weighted it out).
I have noticed your professional background as well as childhood memories, which I think really give you a unique position to understand all this; in your opinion do you feel using CLAS could make enough difference to warrant my going the extra mile (and the extra penny) for these Baltic/Russian breads? Or will just plain ol' stiff sourdough cut it close enough?
If you don't like the idea of CLAS, no need to use it! Rus Brot is a total CLAS convert and evangelist, but he also has plenty of (mostly older) recipes with just "normal" sourdough. Lots of other people here like using CLAS, or there was a wave of posts about a similar technique with FLAS (F for flourless, fermenting whole grains/malt and using the liquid) a while ago. It gives you great (comparable quality) flavour with much less time investment than regular sourdough, and more reproducibility since leavening is perfect every time with commercial yeast. I haven't used it myself for a while, but it made some great breads.
The more traditional approach of course has nothing to do with CLAS, and you can certainly make this type of bread perfectly with a regular rye starter.
(I would advice you to pay attention to the temperature anyway though, it affects the result a lot, changes the taste and flavour, and ensures good crumb in rye bread)
Ilya Flyamer, Thank you! I was hoping for an answer along those lines, but anyway it's a great relief that I don't have to worry about it any more and my doubts are gone.
I would say I get a sufficiently perfect rise every time without CLAS anyway, My starters are very old, very mature, and very active since I bake often. I don't need an improvement here. I was more worried about recreating the correct flavors. Less time investment is a moot point to me as well, I already have my sourdoughs, on the other hand, creating CLAS would require considerable time and equipment investment. So great news!
Regarding temperatures, I am acutely aware of this issue and pay great attention to it. But paying attention is not the same as keeping within plus of minus one degree of a set, desired temperature outside of the easily obtainable range for extended lengths of time. I monitor my dough/leaven temperatures and compensate with time adjustments or simple temperature adjustments where five degrees this way or the other will not make the whole project ultimately fail. By now I know pretty well what to expect from my doughs at various stages and even when I bake a new bread for the second time I usually already feel fairly confident what to do and when. Troubleshooting the first bake of a new recipe usually (but admittedly, not always) points me the right way, So thanks, I am relieved I don't need to strive to adjust to a new leavener. I have an engineer's mind, so a new process always requires the investment of time and effort: first I have to understand the process, next push the limits and establish boundaries, and then finally I know I can be as careless and as sloppy as I care to be as long as I stay within the safe boundaries. Have done some experiments with LM in the past and also concluded it's not for me, since I don't often bake white or sweet breads.
But I love Baltic breads and will keep on trying new ones without the need to grow CLAS, then. Thank you.
Yes, go with whatever approach you prefer, and whatever produces the bread that you enjoy :)
Good luck and have fun. Share your results here!
If you love Baltic rye breads, then you really must try the Latgalian Rye and Palanga Rye from Stanley Ginsberg's website. The Latgalian Rye especially has one of the best flavors of any bread I have made.
alcophile, I make several breads from Stanley Ginsberg's website and his "The Rye Baker" book. The Palanga Rye has been one of my favorite regulars (photo below), but I often struggle with the shape - the bread tends to flatten out on me and some loaves look good, while some are maybe not flat as a pancace, but definitely flatter than I would like, to the point that I have been considering maybe trying to bake this bread in a pan for a chamge.
I have thought about the Latgalian Rye many times, but what scared me was the 18 hours of keeping the scald at 150 degrees. I think now I will have to try it.
But this Borodinsky is quite different than the Palanga Rye -- it's much softer, has a more pronounced sweet/malty flavor and aroma. I think if you cared to try baking it, you would like it.
Your Palanga Rye hardly looks flat at all—just beautiful! I just made that bread last week but only had medium rye. My crumb was not as open as a result. But the flavor was great.
The Latgalian Rye may not be as difficult as you imagine. I found the original described on Sergey's blog:
https://registrr.livejournal.com/68788.html
Ginsberg made two important deviations from the original Latvian recipe. The first is the scald does not need the prolonged hold period: 3 h max at 63–65 °C. Much easier to accomplish. The second is that the addition of the sourdough sponge to the scald is done at 50–55 °C but not mixed in. It's then allowed to cool to 28–32 °C and held at that temperature. Also much easier to do at home.
When I made this about a year ago, I did do the scald for the long period but at a slightly lower temperature. I followed the original when adding the sourdough. The flavor was amazing, definitely worth trying.
alcophile, thanks for the link to the recipe. I love Sergey's recipes, but definitely have not come across this one before. I will try it for sure.
But looking at this recipe made me remember one thing that usually escapes translations from Russian. I grew up in Europe, so I am somewhat familiar with the flours there. I also read (don't speak much) some Russian, enough to be able to, albeit quite laboriously, work my way through the original Russian posts. It requires effort, but with perseverance, I manage. I believe, perhaps our co-conspirator in the great global bread baking conspiracy, Ilya Flyamer, could shed some light on this, but I strongly suspect (but could as well be way off base) that whenever they talk about "мука ржаная обойная", something that Google quite poetically translates into "rye wallpaper flour", this is actually this coarse rye flour that is milled once, at one grade and then just the very biggest chunks of bran get sifted out. This flour is probably the closest to either unsifted wholemeal flour, the Pumpernickel flour in the US, possibly also to medium rye meal. Anyway, In these types or recipes (also in my Palanga bread) I would use Pumpernickel flour. In a pinch I substitute with whole grain rye flour mixed with about 20% (give or take, depending on how daring I feel at the moment) by volume of rye bran. You might want to give Pumpernickel flour a try in these Baltic & Russian breads, I don't think you will be disappointed. Just watch your hydration and adjust by how the dough feels with the particular flour you use. Myself, I prefer to err on the side of too dry, rather than too wet--in my humble opinion dough when it's too dry it will still rise reasonable well, while when too wet--tends to run and flatten out. Not an issue obviously for pan baked breads.
https://khp.by/en/product/rye-bakery-flour-wallpaper-natural-product/
and on this website they explain how they make it https://all.biz/wallpaper-rye-flour-wallpaper-wheat-flour-g1096338UA
DescriptionWe make wallpaper flour.
Wallpaper flour
It is made by a crunching of the whole grain together with a cover. Other found names: integral, wholegrain, grain, tselnosmoloty, simple grinding, rough grinding.
The wallpaper grade flour comes up every time someone google translates a Russian recipe😂
It's basically whole grain flour. Technically it's ~96% extraction flour, basically whole grain flour sifted through a coarse sieve. But in practice for baking at home whole grain flour works the same, no need to do anything special.
Call it overkill, I still like to go as rough as possible for more intense rye flavor, that's why I replace this with Pumpernickel, "2000" (when I can get it), or add rye bran.
Abe, great find! The trick would now be to look inside the bag and figure out the best substitute on our market. "Other found names: integral, wholegrain, grain, tselnosmoloty, simple grinding, rough grinding" could refer to many different products. My feeling is that this will be something similar to the German "once milled" 2000 rye flour, a coarse, grainy, full of bran whole rye flour. Therefore I think, Pumpernickel flour or mixture of whole rye with some rye bran would be an approximation.
I wouldnreally welcome a comment from somebody who knows both Russian and Western flours.
Perhaps completely out of context (who knows what breads they're talking about), but the Modernist guys say that coarse rye makes for a less fluffy bread, and you've got to love the way that this quote includes references to cars and Schwarzenegger:
"The team’s second finding was regarding the nature of rye flour itself. “Rye has proteins analogous to gluten, but they play essentially no role. Instead, there's some molecules called pentosans, a kind of a complicated carbohydrate, which is this weird property that they absorb up to 16 times their own weight in water, and that makes a very viscous gel. So, rye bread, 100% rye bread is all about that gel,” says Myhrvold. “Now, just that thing alone is not explained anywhere, but the next part is the finer you grind the flour, the fluffier the bread is. It's not true for wheat bread, but it is true for rye bread.”
Myhrvold discovered this fact by poring over a translated German technical report in a highly technical book on rye chemistry. “So, it was known in Germany and Austria, but how come that secret didn't pass over here? They import lots of things to us, and that's how we got Arnold Schwarzenegger, BMWs and Mercedes,” he jokes. “There's millions of people in this continent who have German or Austrian or other Northern European ancestry — I'm actually one of them. There's lots of bakeries who make rye bread. How come this piece of information didn't get across?”
-Jon
If true, the Unifine Rye flour I just purchased from Azure Standard should make good whole rye bread. I'll have to give it a try. Of course, I have no idea what type of Rye they grind.
In "fluffier" rye breads, like the Russian, Polish, and Baltic ryes, I will use no, or a relatively smaller proportion of, coarse flour, while in "heavy" German type breads, a higher proportion of coarse flour is often used. For example even in something like Jeffrey Hamelman's Three-Stage 90 Percent Sourdough Rye, which incidentally, I make as a 100% rye, I make two variants, light and dark, in the dark I use exclusively coarse rye flour in the dough and a mix of coarse and fine whole grain ryes in the preferments only. I also add soakers (sunflower, pumpkin, caraway, and light flax seeds along with some nigella and sesame); perhaps it no longer qualifies as Jeffrey Hamelman's bread, but I did initially go off his recipe. This bread is not "fluffy". But in the Borodinsky this post was initially about, I have used mostly finely milled whole rye flours, and the bread was wonderfully airy.
I used Google Translate, but it didn't make any sense. fermented Tea leaves? Rye Wallpaper flour?
Here's a bit more info on fermented tea leaves from @mariana:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/502864#comment-502864
alcophile, yeah, this is another good one by Google :) the problem is that the Russian word describes something that has been infused in boiling water, hence Google creatively surmises it is tea.
But this is fairly straightforward. the more difficult parts are where the words are obvious, but the qualities of the particular Russian product are unknown. Like the flours; every culture has it's flours, German flours are completely different than British, Italian, Slavic, Canadian. Some fours overlap, but some are very specific to each culture. In this very recipe, I had this problem with thinking a specific ingredient was molasses, while in fact it turned out to be barley malt syrup or extract. Understanding the words is one, knowing what specific product in our market is the closest to this, is an entirely different problem.
That makes a lot more sense to me, it's what I used when I started and was experimenting with dark rye bread.
It is nothing like molasses, more like a semisweet malted grain honey ;0)
That's a good description :) the malty flavor fits much better than the flavor of molasses IMHO.
Ilya, but there is already sufficient malt flavor in this bread from the red rye malt. This is what has traditionally been used for these dark ryes in the Baltics, Russia, Belarus and Northeastern Poland.
The malt flavor you get from the red rye malt is a VERY different flavor.
Yes - it's mainly not about the flavor but the maltose afaik. And not introducing wrong flavors, I suppose. In general, RRM is THE main defining feature of these breads (other than the actual technology with the scald etc), and the exact syrup is somewhat secondary.
Sune (Foodgeek) offered a very good substitute for barley malt syrup that I've used and perhaps even prefer in my Danish rye, and that is to take a dark ale, add sugar and then simmer until you have a thick syrup.
I prefer to use a dark stout. The taste is similar, but also, if you use a beer that you like with interesting flavour notes it can be very interesting.
You just want to make sure, if you are buying this from a brew store, that you don't get malt that has been pre-hopped, that would not be a nice flavor in bread :0)
Beet molasses is made from sugar beets.
have you also used pomegranate molasses for Borodinsky? i have that on hand. it is an interesting flavor!
That's very different and way too sour... IMO
Pomegranate molasses is both sweet and sour, I don't think it would go well in this bread. I use it in kissir, I love kissir (this is a Turkish concoction based on fine bulgur and vegetables, it derives the sour flavor in the dressing from pomegranate molasses and sumac. I came across it a long time ago trying to improve my vegetarian Çiğ köfte, which in turn I had come across even a longer time ago wandering the streets if Istanbul trying to kill some time after visiting Haga Sofia and before my flight out. A nice gentleman whipped it out for me in a few minutes, amazed that I wanted a meatless dish, something that was then apparently pretty impossible to get in a Turkish restaurant). Now I regularly make both. Even my kids like kisir, which is a statement in itself, because they will not touch my breads other that whiteish Pullman bread.
Hi,
I have been reading about kisir and tabouleh with pomegranate mol.
I eat tabouleh daily with hummus and pita but now I see that I have most of the components for a kisir salad.
For bulgur, I toast soft wheat to a golden brown and then Icrack it in the grain mill. It adds a wonderful fragrance. Maybe I can soak this cracked toasted grain in the boiling water for kisir.
Thank you for showing your Borodinsky. It looks so good!
jo_en, you can try, let me know how it comes out.
Personally, for kisir I use fine bulgur, since it infuses much quicker than coarse or medium. I also use less bulgur vs veggies than most recipes call for and more dressing; I also use a ton of parsley and mint. Sumac is important; if you don't have it, I would advise adding more lemon juice to replace a bit of the hot water. I have also found that adding salt to the chopped veggies and letting them drain some on a colander makes for a less runny, drier result. All in all, what I think I like best about kisir is the quality of tartness created by the combination of pomegranate syrup and sumac, as an alternative to the more commonly used dressings with vinegar or lemon juice, and the tomatoey-sweet peppery (I use mild pepper paste, my kids don't take well to spice; however, I would advice hot pepper paste, or add some hot sauce) tones in the dressing.
Bon appetit!
That is one beautiful rye bread! I'll bet it tastes even better than it looks.
I will definitely have to put this one on my list of ryes to bake.