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A Staple for Smørrebrød
If you aren’t familiar with rugbrød, or Danish rye bread, you’re really missing out! We use this dense, seeded bread for open-faced sandwiches, or smørrebrød. The quintessential Danish baked good is probably rugbrød, because not only is smørrebrød the national dish of Denmark, but many Danes eat it every single day! We love to eat it topped with with leverpostej (liver pate) and rødbeder (pickled beets). This may sound strange to non-Danes, but it’s the single most delicious sandwich in the world!
Homemade Is Best
Unfortunately, rye bread in the US means something completely different. It’s usually a sandwich bread with no seeds that really just tastes like caraway. That’s why we are constantly hunting for simple ways to bake our own homemade rugbrød. Our favorite way is to use sourdough starter, because it gives the bread the proper sourness, but we understand that not everyone has sourdough starter, or wants to spend a week preparing to make this bread! So, in this recipe we use Greek yoghurt and buttermilk instead, and it still yields a phenomenal result!
Tips & Tricks
This recipe is long, but simple, and you don’t have to knead anything with your hands! If you have a stand mixer, it’s easy and quick to make the dough, and there’s really no shaping of the loaf involved (you just squish it into the loaf tin). The only thing that might be difficult is getting ahold of all the ingredients. We order the rye berries, cracked wheat, and rye flour online, but everything else is available in American grocery stores. If you are unable to get cracked rye berries, and can only buy whole ones, that’s fine! Just run them through a food processor a few times with a tiny bit of water and they should at least get a little bit more broken up.
We hope you enjoy this recipe, as it’s one of our favorites! And look out for a sourdough rugbrød recipe coming soon! If you make our recipe, be sure to leave a comment or rating below and tag us on Instagram if you post a photo!
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Rugbrød (Danish Rye bread)
This recipe yields a delicious, seeded rye bread that works well for traditional Danish smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches). Our favorite combinations of toppings include pickled herring and onions, mackerel in tomato sauce with cucumber, and liver pate with pickled beets!
Ingredients
- 2 tsp instant yeast (2.25 tsp active-dry yeast, 17.5g fresh yeast)
- 200 ml (a little under 1 cup) warm water
- 70 grams (1/2 cup) sunflower seeds (ours were from Terrasoul)
- 80 grams (1/2 cup) flax seeds (ours were from Terrasoul)
- 100 grams (3/4 cup) chopped rye OR cracked rye berries (if using cracked rye berries or even whole rye berries, soak them for 8 hours/overnight before using!)
- 80 grams (1/2 cup) cracked wheat OR bulgur wheat
- 1/2 liter of Greek yoghurt
- 100 ml (1/2 cup) buttermilk
- 100 grams (3/4 cup) whole wheat flour
- 300 grams (2 1/2 cups) rye flour
- 75 grams (1/2 cup + 1 tbsp) all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp salt
- Extra sunflower seeds for the top
Instructions
- If you are using cracked rye berries or even whole rye berries, we recommend soaking them for 8 hours or overnight before using. If you have chopped rye, we haven't found soaking to be necessary!
- First, heat up your water until "fingervarm" (finger warm, meaning it should feel warm to the touch, but not hot) – or just use warm water from the tap – and add the yeast to it. Stir to dissolve, then let sit for 5-10 minutes until the mixture becomes bubbly and frothy. If the mixture doesn't froth, try adding a tiny bit of sugar to the water. If it still doesn't do anything, your yeast may be expired – we would recommend starting over with new yeast!
- Next, combine all of the seeds (flax seeds, sunflower seeds, chopped rye, cracked wheat) in a large mixing bowl (if you have a stand mixer, you will need to use it, so use the bowl from the mixer).
- Once the yeast mixture has bloomed, add it to the seeds. Then add your yoghurt and buttermilk and mix well.
- Combine the three flours and salt in a separate bowl. Whisk to combine the ingredients.
- Now you will need to use a stand mixer, fitted with a dough hook (you can also do this by hand using a wooden spoon, but it will be tough work!). Slowly add the flour mixture bit by bit while the mixer is running on low speed, letting it fully incorporate each time. You should end up with a very claggy and heavy dough (it will not be like any other bread dough you have worked with before – it is impossible to knead by hand!).
- Once all the flour has been added, you want to let the stand mixer knead the dough for about 10 minutes. Again, you could try this using a wooden spoon, but it will take a lot of hard work! By the end, it should still be claggy and dense, but should not be quite as sticky as when you started kneading.
- Let the dough rise, either for 8-12 hours overnight in the fridge, or for 1 hour at room temperature.
- Line a large loaf tin (2lb or 900g capacity) with parchment paper and oil any sides of the tin that are bare (you really don't want this bread to stick to the tin). Alternatively, you can use 2 smaller loaf tins to bake the bread.
- Once your dough has risen (although beware – you may not be able to visually see much of a difference with this dough), fill the tin with the dough and press it down so that you don't end up with gaps of air in the final product.
- Use a fork to poke holes in the surface of the dough.
- Cover with plastic wrap or a damp dish towel and let the dough rise a second time, this time for around 45 minutes at room temperature. In the meantime, preheat your oven to 390 degrees F (200 C).
- After the second rise, brush the top of your loaf with water and sprinkle with sunflower seeds, then place it on the bottom rack of the oven, and immediately turn the oven temperature down to 320 degrees F (160 C).
- Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes – it should be evenly browned across the top; if in doubt whether it's done, you can leave it in for 10 minutes longer! The best way to confirm that it's done is to check the internal temperature with a thermometer – it should be at around 210 F or 99 C, a few degrees either side of that will be fine. Keep in mind we bake using convection settings, so if you don't use convection, it may take a little bit longer.
- Remove from the tin after it has cooled off slightly, and let it rest on a cooling rack. We recommend waiting at least an hour before slicing, but it will be even easier to slice the next day. Enjoy!
Can you add seeds to the dough?
Hello! This recipe does already include sunflower seeds, flax seeds and chopped rye/rye berries, but if you would like to add a different mix of seeds, just make sure to keep the total weight of the seeds the same so that the ratio of dough to seeds is consistent!
Is there anything I can use instead of cracked wheat OR bulgur wheat?
Hi! I’m not too sure to be honest, I would try using another type of grain. Alternatively, you can just increase the amounts of the other seeds and ingredients to replace the cracked wheat.
What size tin did you use? My bread is overflowing my 900g tin in the oven!
Oh no! Really sorry to hear that! Hopefully it will still come out okay. We also use a 900g or 2 lb tin (I’ll edit the recipe to specify that), so I’m not sure why that’s happening. Perhaps some issue with the yeast or proofing? This dough shouldn’t really rise all that much while proofing or in the oven, only a little bit!
Many thanks Emma. I tried this afternoon with a half size and it worked much better, although I think I needed another 10 mins bake. Much less rise than last week, my yeast may have been a bit too fresh then.
The bread turns out quite light in colour. What’s the secret to a really dark rugbrød?
Great, so happy to hear it! It can take a couple of tries to get it perfect – if you have a thermometer, you could always check the internal temp for doneness – should be 99 C!
As for the color, this recipe uses ingredients that are (generally) easy to find outside of Denmark, but for a dark rugbrød, you need dark malt flour, dark rye flour and malt syrup. You could play around with adding those to this recipe if you can find them! And hopefully, we’ll be able to develop a recipe with those ingredients at some point 🙂
Having made this multiple times in the past few months, I decided to make two smaller loaves out of the recipe. I baked them in smaller pans, for 45 mins, turned off the oven, then left them in there for a further 10 minutes. Internal temperature was 96C, so I hoped they were done. They were, so this is probably how I’ll do it from now on. Thanks for the recipe!
Great tip! I think this is also such a good idea if you only have the smaller pans, and you can just split it into 2 smaller loaves instead of going out and buying a bigger pan. And yes – internal temp is so helpful to make sure it’s done, nobody wants underbaked rye bread. I’ll add these extra details to the recipe, so thank you for the comment. And really happy to hear you like the bread!