Homemade czech rye bread!

As you probably know, I cannot live without soup and I’m the same with Czech bread… I love it and always miss it while we’re out traveling. It’s very simple to bake but the ingredients can only be easily found in our country.

I have a lot of time to bake new recipes because we are currently in Czech republic  for a few months, we have a baby on the way and I don’t work. Since Czech bread is a pillar of our Czech cuisine, I thought I would learn how to bake it.

I got the recipe from my uncle’s girlfriend at a family bbq. As soon as she began to cut into this enormous brown loaf of Czech goodness, everybody jumped on it. It looked so fresh, so fluffy and the crust was extra crispy.

Not too long ago I started baking bread and this is by far one of my favorites to bake. I’ve tried to bake different types of bread several times, but this recipe won. I guess that’s because I succeeded on the first try even though the dough wasn’t as fluffy and the crust was a little harder than we expected, but the taste got all of us home. The next day, I tried again and fixed what was wrong the day before and the bread turned out amazing 😀

So let’s go over the recipe together.

You can find the sourdough starter at a store, or if you’re having trouble locating it, use the map below:

(If you’re in South America or Africa, I guess you’re out of luck according to this map.)

Let’s get all the ingredients ready:

1 tsp of sourdough
200g rye flour
200ml of water
+ for next day – 600g of all purpose flour (or you can mix it with 200g of wholemeal flour as me)
2 cups of water
1 tsp of caraway
1 tsp of anise
2 tsp of salt
1/2 tsp od dry yeast

First, we need to establish the homemade sourdough starter 😀 We will ferment it and in a few hours, you’ll have a happy, active bowl of yeast and flower sitting on your counter.

Prepare a glass or plastic bowl and wooden spoon. Do not use metal. This is very important because the dough cannot come into contact with something metallic. Put 200g rye flour, 200ml of water and a tablespoon of sourdough inside the bowl and mix it well. You will have a nice half-thick dough which you will leave fermenting for about 12 hours.

The next day…

After 12 hours, we should have some great fermented dough. We will add 600 grams of all purpose flour (or 400g all purpose and 200 grams wholemeal flour), mix it with all dry ingredients  and 2 cups of water. Leave it for 30 minutes while you preheat your oven for 250 degrees Celcius. Put the empty baking pot which you will use for your loaf of bread.

After 30 minutes, put the dough into the baking pot and bake for about 45 minutes on 230 degrees Celsius with the lid on, then another 20 minutes without lid. Turn off your oven and leave the bread inside for the last 10 minutes.

Your bread is done! It’s time to slice it, sit down and love it <3