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My parents were coming over for dinner, so I wanted to make a bread for a Norwegian-style dinner. Pretty quickly in my searches, I came across a bread called "rugbrød", which I suppose simply means "rye bread". But the recipe I found had what seemed to be too much sugar, corn syrup, and grated orange peel. So I decided to make some alterations. Here are the final amounts, and I'll get into the story next.

• 2 ½ c. all-purpose flour
• 1 ½ c. warm water
• 1 ½ tsp. yeast
• 2 tbsp. sucanat (sugar)
• 2 tbsp. molasses
• 2 tbsp. melted butter
• ½ tsp. sea salt
• 1 c. warm almond milk
• 2 ½ tsp. fennel seeds
• 1 tbsp. grated orange peel
• 2 c. rye flour
• 2 c. graham flour
• 1 ½ tsp. caraway seeds

I lost count, but I think those were the final amounts. That's not to say they were the correct amounts, just that that's how it ended up. Now the story.

My source is Daughters of Norway. I cut all the ingredient amounts in half because they said it would make two large loaves. The thing I should point out is the above list's amounts aren't the results of the initial calculation. They were telling me to use 2 cups of liquid and 3 cups of flour. It felt weird, but maybe they knew something I didn't.

As a side note, I couldn't find any graham flour, so I made some by combining all-purpose flour, wheat bran, and wheat germ in a ratio you can easily find online.

To continue, When I had finally mixed all the ingredients together, I was left with batter. Not dough, but batter. What one does in this situation is add more flour, but I had three kinds plus wheat bran and wheat germ. It took some doing to get a better consistency because I had to add little by little, a half cup at a time. And only later did I realize that I neglected to up the salt and orange rind as well. I don't even think I added enough fennel and caraway seeds. When I formed the dough into a loaf for the oven, I had a giant loaf roughly measuring 2 feet long.

Everyone seemed to have liked it, but I think it was low on the ingredients I mentionned above: salt, orange, and seeds.

Now, why did this go so wrong? I blame the original recipe. They had the wrong amount of liquids listed. By far. One of my loaves tends to have about 3 1/4 cups of flour and 1 cup of water. Given that ratio and the 3 cups of flour I had intended to put in this bread, I should have only had 0.9 cups of water. I had more than double that. Even accounting for the original recipe's large amounts of sugar and orange rind, they were completely wrong.

I'll keep this in mind and come back to this recipe in the future.

2019 UPDATE: More research on this shows me this is actually limpa, a Swedish bread, and rugbrød is Danish. Neither is Norwegian.