Hamelman's Black Bread, I followed  his direction exactly and found the breads had  little oven spring. But the favor and taste are wonderful. 

I buy the Organic Baby Spring Mix every week for salad. I saved all the containers for storage. I found it made a wonderful bread box and also good for bulk fermentation. You can see through the container. 

I grew up in Oak Park, Michigan. We had a fabulous Jewish bakery, Modern Bakery, that made great rye bread (the inspiration of Zingerman's Bakehouse in Ann Arbor's Jewish rye bread) and they also made a bread called Russian Black Bread. I have looked at all the recipes for Russian Black Bread and they don't resemble that bread at all. It had a very coarse, wet crumb and had a very long shelf life (as long as it didn't get moldy it didn't dry out). Anyone know about that specific bakery's Black Bread. BTW sometimes it had raisins and the bread was a large long square loaf that was sold as slices from the original loaf. Thanks

Hi, all.  I'm new around here, but thought maybe someone here could help me out.

More than 20 years ago I was an exchange student in Wurzburg, Germany (in lower Franconia).  The staple bread in the home I lived in was known as Schwarzbrot (black bread).  I'm not sure if it is native to that area or to Rhineland-Pfalz (my host-father was from there).  Anyway, it was round, strongly flavored, and very dark brown and some loaves were enormous.  I once saw a 2 kg loaf!