What ever happened to those wonderful Swedish smorgasbord restaurants?
They were having a moment when I was a younger cook. I remember the beautiful buffets of delicious delicacies. I still crave the savory breads.
So it was with great anticipation and a good bit of nostalgia that I took my first taste of this Buttermilk-Molasses Quick Bread from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking With Dorie cookbook. (Available at your local bookstore and on Amazon here.) This particular recipe is a Greenspan adaptation of a recipe she enjoyed at the Ett Hem Guesthouse in Stockholm.
Perfect!
The bread was absolutely superb with caraway, anise and fennel spices all competing for my taste buds’ attention and only the barest hint of molasses-driven sweetness.
You can enjoy using this bread to make a buffet of beautiful little open-faced sandwiches or serving it as a breakfast bread.
For my petite sandwiches, I used butter or cream cheese as the spread on my bread. As you can see from the photograph, I decorated the sandwiches with everything from marmalade to strawberries to thin slices of avocado dusted with cayenne pepper. Use whatever catches your fancy. Food scientists have long told us that we “eat with our eyes.” These beautiful little sandwiches certainly bear that out. No wonder that Swedish smorgasbords are hours-long affairs!
Valsmakande (tasty!), as the Swedes would say.
Buttermilk-Molasses Quick Bread
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 C. all-purpose flour
- 3/4 C. rye flour
- 1/2 C. whole wheat flour
- 1/4 C. wheat bran
- 2 T. wheat germ
- 2 1/4 t. baking soda
- 1 t. fine sea salt
- 2 t. ground anise
- 1 1/2 t. ground caraway
- 1 1/2 t. ground fennel
- 2 1/3 C. buttermilk (well-shaken)
- 1/2 C. unsulfured molasses
Directions
- Step 1 Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
- Step 2 Butter a 9-inch loaf pan.
- Step 3 Whisk all of the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Set aside.
- Step 4 Mix buttermilk and molasses. (I used dry buttermilk powder and reconstituted it with water in a large jar. Once the buttermilk was shaken and dissolved, I added the molasses on the jar and gave it a good shake.)
- Step 5 Pour the buttermilk/molasses mixture into the dry ingredients. Stir the mixture until the dry ingredients are totally moistened. Scrape the batter into your prepared loaf pan. Give the loaf pan a good tap on your counter to settle the batter into the pan.
- Step 6 Bake at 300 degrees F. for 65 minutes. Your bread is done when a skewer inserted into the middle of the bread comes out clean. (Cook’s Note: I did tent my loaf with foil for about the last 20 minutes because the top of the loaf was getting too brown.) When the bread is baked, remove it from the oven and use a knife to loosen the sides of the bread from the pan. Turn the bread out of the pan and then invert again. Cool to room temperature before serving. This bread improves overnight. Wrap in foil to store the bread overnight.
