Knäckebröd

Swedish crisp rye flatbread rounds with a hole in the centre, pricked all over and baked hard

Origin: Stockholm & Sweden

From the journey of Rye.

Knäckebröd is crispbread: thin rounds or sheets of rye dough, pricked all over, baked hard, and dried until they will keep for months. It is on the table at nearly every Swedish breakfast and in a great many Swedish lunch boxes, eaten with butter and hard cheese, and Finland eats it just as widely as näkkileipä. Its form was dictated by storage. In the rye-growing districts of central Sweden, bread was traditionally baked in large batches only a few times a year, in rounds with a hole in the middle, and the rounds were threaded onto wooden poles hung up under the roof of the house, where they dried and kept until the next baking. The hole is still there in many modern crispbreads, although nothing now hangs on a pole. Popular accounts of how old the custom is vary by many centuries and the documentary record for its early history is thin, but the logic of it is plain: in a cold country with a short growing season, a bread with no moisture left in it could not go mouldy. The industry that followed is well recorded. According to the company's own history, Karl Edvard Lundström began baking crispbread in Skellefteå in 1915, founded his company in 1919, moved production to Filipstad in Värmland in 1931, and adopted the brand name Wasa in 1934, after the sixteenth-century king Gustav Vasa. Wasa and its competitors carried Swedish crispbread across the world in the decades that followed. Home-baked knäckebröd tastes considerably better than most of what is sold, and a Swedish kitchen may have a kruskavel, a knobbed rolling pin that presses the characteristic pattern of dimples into the dough.

Ingredients

  • 400 g wholemeal rye flour
  • 100 g strong white wheat flour
  • 7 g dried yeast
  • 1 tsp fine sea salt
  • 1 tsp caraway or fennel seeds (optional)
  • 300 ml lukewarm water
  • 4 tbsp rye flour, for rolling

Method

  1. Mix the flours, yeast, salt, and seeds in a large bowl, add the water, and work into a firm dough. Knead for five minutes on a lightly floured surface.
  2. Cover and leave to rise for one hour in a warm place.
  3. Heat the oven to 220 °C. Divide the dough into 12 pieces.
  4. On rye-floured baking parchment, roll each piece into a very thin round about 18 cm across and 2 to 3 mm thick. Cut a hole about 3 cm across from the centre with a small glass or cutter.
  5. Prick each round all over with a fork, or roll over it once with a kruskavel, then leave to rest for 20 minutes.
  6. Bake two trays at a time for 10 to 12 minutes, until firm and lightly browned at the edges.
  7. When all are baked, lower the oven to 100 °C, return all the rounds to it on racks, and dry them for 30 to 45 minutes, until completely crisp right through.

Notes

Stored in an airtight tin, or threaded onto a wooden dowel and hung in a dry kitchen in the old way, knäckebröd keeps for weeks. A sourdough version replaces the yeast with 150 g of active rye starter and gives a sharper flavour; allow three to four hours for the rise. The Swedish way to eat it is with butter and a hard cheese such as Västerbotten, with a smoked cod roe spread, or with pickled herring at midsummer.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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