Icelandic Volcano Bread - Rúgbrauð

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LINKS TO INGREDIENTS & EQUIPMENT**

RECIPE
4 cups (480g) rye flour
2 cups (240g) whole wheat flour
1 cup (200g) brown sugar
1 cup (335g) golden syrup
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 quart (1L) whole milk
1 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat the oven to 215°F/100°C.
2. Whisk the flours together with the baking powder, salt, sugar and golden syrup. Adding a little at a time, mix in the whole milk. You may not need the full quart, but as you mix, the rye will soak up a lot, so make sure you add enough to get the consistency of a cake batter.
3. Pour the batter into a well greased dutch oven or other container that you can seal (it does not need to be airtight, but a good seal is needed to keep in the steam.
4. Bake for 14 - 24 hours. Do not leave the oven unattended over night. Once baked, remove the bread from the oven, turn it out, and slice while hot. Serve with butter.

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Subtitles: Jose Mendoza

PHOTO CREDITS

#tastinghistory #iceland #thorrablot

[TastingHistory]

Icelandic has to be in my top 3 hardest languages to pronounce, so thank you to Gunnlaugur Ólafsson and Ólafur Waage for your help is getting me as far as I could go.

[rkodins]

Oh yay! Two seconds in and I see my hometown! Fun fact, the volcano in those couple seconds is too cold to bake bread. The one a hundred meters left of it is the hot one, I made bread in that one a lot with my friends as a kid. Your research is extremely thorough though, I learned stuff I didn't know like the origin of Þorrablót!

[Anesthesia]

Another reason the dough doesn't turn into hard tack *tack tack* is because rye amylases will saccharify the starches in the flours at lower temperatures. At 100C, it will take a while to denature the enzymes, so the dough has more of a syrupy quality. That and the sealed steaming makes it soft.

[Tesana]

Love how almost every time Max mentions hard-tack he inserts a clip of his hitting two hard-tack biscuits together.

[ashleyhyatt]

Here in Japan, specifically the nearby Kirishima region, we also use volcanic vents to cook food. We make chicken, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, mochi, etc. ; it's quite good;)

[sarahkemp]

Max! I'm so glad you noticed the bees! My great-grandpa was the commercial artist who designed that tin, for Lyle's Golden Syrup. The tins were made by a company called Metal Box in London. It always makes me smile to see his work still in use and appreciated and (mostly) unchanged. You're totally on the money about the backstory, too - I remember being shown the reference material a very long time ago. Oh, and as ever, great episode, both informative and entertaining, and now I have proof of your A+ research quality too ;)

[mistermanager]

When I visited Iceland there was a nice little restaurant near the large cathedral in Reykjavik called Cafe Loki. They made rye bread ice cream that was out of these nine worlds

[Bryndis]

Hi
Great job on baking and pronouncing these Icelandic words.
I’m Icelandic born and raised. There are many different Recipes for Rúgbrauð, depending on where in Iceland you come from. Mine witch is over 100 years old has no brown sugar only syrup and not baking powder but baking soda. Also, I use buttermilk instead of milk and I bake my bread for 10 hours on 120 degrees. I just wanted to share that with you. Good luck 😉

[scorpio]

Max’s work time must be 50% research, 40% learning pronunciations and 10% cooking ‘cos it’s always a blast to hear foreign words pronounced in what I can only assume to be a proper pronunciation.

[stephinepasak]

I love when you “hard tac” us it’s like being Rick Rolled 😂

[oliverb]

I love how the moment he starts talking about baking bread for 24 hours gets my "hard tack" sense tingling

[HiIeric]

Hey! I remember Gordon Ramsay actually baking this in a volcano only to have some local Icelander steal it overnight! Must be some darn good stuff.

[CalebCalixFernandez]

A fun fact about rye: many people who try to make rye bread for the first time complain that it's very difficult to make a dough with rye flour. The reason why is that rye's gluten, to use a more familiar term, comes from a protein called secalin. Secalin can only be formed in acidic conditions, and that why most rye breads are made from sourdough. Just to be clear, secalin is a gluten protein, so people affected by gluten must avoid it.

[donaldneill]

As a Canuck who married into a Danish family, I've spent the past 30 years perfecting my rygbrod recipe. And the klipfisk looks great, though I imagine the dried salt cod would have been soaked and even cooked before eating. A recipe you might want to try is 'Fish and Brewis (with or without scrunchins)', an old standard from Newfoundland, where you begin by soaking dried salt fish overnight to rehydrate it and leach out some of the salt, before cooking it in milk along with - gasp - hard bread! (TACK TACK), and serving it with crispy diced fatback (the 'scrunchins'). If you want to go full Newfie, serve it with a side of lemony peas. Great video as always, keep'em coming!

[helgijonsson]

Hi, I'm Icelandic and a big fan of the channel. Thanks for spreading the delight of Rúgbrauð to everyone! There's a bunch more Icelandic foods that I think you might find palatable, for example kleinur (basically twisted donuts), flatkökur (dark brown flatbread) and hangikjöt (smoked lamb). Feel free to PM me if you need any translations or tips for more Icelandic food you want to try!
By the way, when I make rúgbrauð I use súrmjólk (I guess it's similar to buttermilk in the US) instead of milk and I skip the brown sugar and use more syrup instead.

[petergray]

The history of Rye cultivation is probably the weirdest in all of agriculture. Wheat was the earliest grain to be domesticated and cultivated by the peoples of northern Mesopotamia around 9000 years ago, and they also eventually domesticated barley about 2000 years after that. But there were other grain plants that were mixed in that were troublesome weeds, and these included Rye and Oats. Though Rye is originally from the Levant, it first appears in domestic cultivation 1800 BC, almost exclusively in Central Europe, most notably in the Northern Balkans in what is now Serbia and Romania. Rye grains are almost indistinguishable from Emmer wheat (an evolutionary mimicry called Vavilovian mimicry), meaning that any quantity of wheat grains also held rye unless farmers carefully culled the mature plants. Historians and biologists theorize that northern Balkan peoples at the time acquired wheat mixed with rye, and being noobs, discovered an edible weed that was quite tasty.

[ElleAngelNight]

an Icelander here. just made Slátur (slaughter) which is also a traditional food for Þorrablót. its two types of basically sausage one made of sheepsblood and fat and the other made with liver and kidney. it is delicious. Rúgbrauð is eaten all year round and most often with fish. This video was great and you're welcome to visit us up north whenever, just be sure to bring a warm coat.

[garlandbest]

Having watched Max "enjoy" both dried fish and hard tack, it's time for him to put both together, and make Newfoundland Fish and Brewis, and learn the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery, it's links to the slave trade, the British empire, and the wars fought between France and Britain over it.

[HalIucinations]

Seeing Max unable to say "liquid hot magma" without letting out a mild Dr Evil impression makes me smile

[opheliaronin]

Why do you not have an hour-long show on the discovery channel? You’re amazing! One of my favorite cooking shows ever! I just cannot believe that some channel has not scooped you up. ❤️