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, and this chapter treats that distinction as worth stating plainly rather than letting the ingredients' age imply the genre's.
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.