The Nordics and the Baltic · Volume 23, The North Atlantic under the Danish Crown
Rugbrød med Sol over Gudhjem
Denmark
Illustration
- Time
- 48 hours
- Researched
- 5 sources cited
Smørrebrød is younger than its reputation. The composed, named, menu-driven genre most people picture dates specifically to 1880s Copenhagen: Restaurant Nimb's 1883 menu is the earliest known example, and Oskar Davidsen's wine bar, from 1888, eventually offered up to one hundred and seventy variants on a menu roughly a metre and a half long. The raw ingredients, bread, preserved fish, cheese, pork, are genuinely old, present in the Viking-era diet; the composed, ordered dish sitting on top of them is not.
As tradition built it
Makes 3 loaves. 48 hours, mostly unattended.
Ingredients
- 2 to 3 dl active rye sourdough starter
- 1.5 litres lukewarm water
- 700 g wheat flour
- 500 g whole rye kernels
- 150 g rye flour
- 500 g chopped rye kernels, for day two
- 500 g rye flour, for day two
- 3 tbsp dark syrup
- 0.5 litre lukewarm water, for day two
- 3 tbsp salt
- to serve smoked herring
- to serve chives
- 1 per person raw egg yolk
Method
- Day one. Mix the starter with the water, wheat flour, whole rye kernels and rye flour to a loose, porridge-like dough. Cover and rest overnight at room temperature.
- Day two. Reserve 2 to 3 dl of the day-one dough to refresh your next starter. Combine the rest with the chopped rye kernels, rye flour, syrup, water and salt.
- Divide between three greased loaf tins, and prove 3 to 5 hours, until visibly risen.
- Bake about 1.5 hours at 170°C, then unmould and dry a further 30 minutes at 90°C to firm the crust.
- Cool completely, and slice thinly, ideally the next day, once the crumb has fully set.
- To serve as Sol over Gudhjem: butter a slice generously, lay smoked herring fillets across it, top with a raw egg yolk sitting whole in a small dip in the herring, and scatter with chopped chives.
What a modern chef changes
The starter maintained as a genuine living culture, and the herring smoked at home rather than bought pre-cured
Rung 5, and Rung 3 for the herring.
Method
- Keep a real, continuously refreshed rye starter, not a one-off sourdough bought in for the occasion. A starter fed weekly for months develops a depth of sour flavour a fresh one cannot fake, and this bread is honest about depending on that time rather than a shortcut.
- Cold-smoke your own herring or mackerel on a Big Green Egg fitted with a cold smoke attachment, held at or below 30°C. Ten minutes' salting followed by an hour or two of genuine cold smoke over birch chips gives a cleaner, less aggressively salty result than most shop-bought smoked herring, and lets you judge the smoke's strength yourself.
- Serve the egg yolk raw and whole, unbroken until the diner breaks it themselves at the table, exactly as the dish's own name and structure demand: it is the yolk breaking across the fish that the dish is actually built around, and there is no elevation that improves on simply doing that correctly.