March 20, 2014 - 6:32am
Trying to find the name and recipe of a super dense, seed heavy bread I enjoyed in Prague last fall
Hello,
When I was in Prague last October, most places we went to served a very dense bread covered in seeds (I think pumpkin, but I could be wrong), that also had lots of seeds inside the dough. It was baked in a typical loaf pan. It was so ubiquitous that I thought upon returning I would be able to easily find it, but its been difficult, if for no other reason that most sites from the region are not in english.
Can anyone tell me the name of this type of bread, and maybe give a recipe as well?
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I found this: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/31232/memories-czech-rye
Although it's not coated in pumpkin seeds, it does include them as well as caraway. Does that seem similar to what you're looking for? If so, I'm sure you could do some slight modifications to recreate the bread of your dreams! I don't see why you couldn't cover it with seeds and try it out in a loaf pan.
I saw this post actually when I was searching. Its a smidge like that, but it was always baked in a loaf pan, and there was no crumb to speak of- it was unapologetically dense, and had literally about 10x more seeds.
I guess it looked a lot more like this: http://prague-stay.com/img/17036/13/true/Prague%201%20Josefov%20Mansson%20Bakery%20Pumpkin%20Rye.png
but that is still a bit off, it had way more seeds, the crumb wasn't quite as dark.
I could try to recreate it, I just feel it would take months of tweaking to get it right, and there might be some secret local ingredients I would never get right. It was also so popular there at the time, I thought it would be a simple google search to be inundated with recipes.
And I guess it is a rye bread. So I refined my search to "czech pumpkin rye bread" and found some stuff that is much closer to what I was looking for. In particular, this: http://seitanismymotor.com/2010/02/100-percent-rye-bread/ looks kind of close to what we had, and I can definitely use that as a starting point.
The thing is, it was just so popular there, I feel like I am just missing the boat. As in, if someone on this board lived in the area, they would say "oh duh, that is So and So, search for this and you will get hundreds of links to recipes." But I already have a sourdough starter going, so I will start with this link tomorrow if I can't find anything better.
I see. Perhaps a better starting point would be something in the rugbrød family? I know it's not a Czech bread, but it seems like it may be the most similar to what you're looking for. You can do a really, really dense one of those. They can have almost no flour sometimes
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That lower left one shown with the cucumber is very close to what we had- the only real difference would be that it was covered in a layer of seeds. The other two were actually a bit more dense, but this gives me an avenue to look into.
What about this one?:
http://ona.idnes.cz/upecte-si-svuj-spaldovy-chleb-d2t-/recepty.aspx?c=A080903_103845_recepty_ves
only in a loaf pan?
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/161235#comment-161235
or this?
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35940/pumpkin-sourdough-rye-bbd-62