Finnish flat round loaf of pure rye sourdough, pricked, crackled, and dusted with rye flour
Origin: Karelia & Eastern Finland
From the journey of Rye.
Ruisleipä is Finnish rye bread, and in Finland it is simply bread. It is made from wholemeal rye flour, water, salt, and a sourdough leaven, with no sugar, no malt, and usually no wheat at all, and it is sourer and firmer than the rye breads of Denmark, Latvia, or Russia. It is eaten at every meal, and in 2017, in a public vote held to mark the centenary of Finnish independence, Finns chose it as their national food. The leaven is the household's own. It was kept going from one baking to the next in the wooden dough trough, which was traditionally never scrubbed completely clean, so that the culture left in the grain of the wood started the next batch. Finland has two broad baking traditions, and they divide roughly between west and east. In the west, rye bread was baked only a few times a year as reikäleipä, hole bread, flat rounds with a hole in the centre that were dried on poles under the ceiling like Swedish crispbread. In the east and in Karelia, where the slash-and-burn cultivation of rye on freshly burned forest land lasted into the nineteenth century, bread was baked less at a time but at least weekly, and the loaves were thicker, sourer, and eaten fresh. The loaf here is the eastern kind: a flat round, pricked with a fork, and baked hot until the crust cracks. Rye suited Finland because it will ripen in a short, cold summer, and for centuries it was the grain on which the country's survival depended. The bread keeps for a week, grows more sour as it does, and is at its best toasted with butter.
For the western reikäleipä, press the dough out to 2 cm thick, cut a 5 cm hole from the centre, and bake for 30 to 35 minutes. Once cold, it can be dried in a low oven and will keep for weeks. Keep back a tablespoon of the dough in a jar in the refrigerator as the starter for the next bake, as Finnish households have always done. Ruisleipä is eaten with butter and cheese, with cold-smoked salmon, with lohikeitto, and alongside almost anything. Split and toasted, it is the base of a Finnish breakfast.
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