The Grain Gathering 2015: keynote speaker Marie-Louise Risgaard

I was delighted to read on the 2015 Grain Gathering program that Marie-Louise Risgaard would deliver one of the keynote addresses. I had never met her but I knew that her family had a farm and a milling business in Denmark and I owned and loved her mom's book, Home Baked: Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry. Hanne Risgaard's Real Rye Bread was actually the very first bread I had baked in the months after we lost Noah, in part because having never baked rye bread with the grand-kids, I wasn't weary of re-awakening painful connections, but also because I had wonderful memories of summer vacations spent in Denmark with my former in-laws when our own children were little and I was hoping to find some degree of comfort in making rugbrød, a staple in their household. The recipe is terrific as are many others in the book and now I was to hear Marie-Louise, Hannah's daughter, tell in person the story of Skaertoft Mølle, her family's small organic mill (mølle means "mill" in Danish). How lucky was that?

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

Marie-Louise herself isn't a miller. She's a baker and an instructor. Her dad, Jørgen, is the miller "and technical genius," Hanne, her mom, the driving force behind it all and the one who keeps reminding both of them that, in the words of Marcel Proust, "the real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

Jørgen was a farmer-teacher with an MBA and Hanne a journalist working in both radio and television when, in 1983, they took over Skaertoft, a farm that had been in Jørgen's family since 1892. For a few years they both kept their outside full-time jobs and farmed the land with artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Then they had a visit from an adviser who introduced them to organic farming. That was their first eye-opening.

Photo courtesy of Skaertof Mølle

The second came in August 2003 when a question popped up in a radio program they were listening to: how come there was no good organic bread flour on the Danish market? They saw their chance and jumped for it. At the time Marie-Louise was finishing her master's degree in agricultural studies. She became her parents' scientific anchor as, over the next three months, they worked on developing a 5-year business plan. The family got in touch with Irma, a high-end supermarket chain which had been very supportive of organic farming since 1987. Irma was enthusiastic and placed an order for flour. The only problem was that it gave them only eight months to deliver it. The family had no mill yet. Only an old cow stable in which to put one. Which they did. And on June 1st 2004, they shipped that first order. Right on schedule.
But not before the family had acquired a third set of eyes: their flour was going to be the best, a high-end organic product that would sell for much more than the regular supermarket flour (€3.80 as opposed to €1.20). It needed a distinctive face. No happy farmer against a sunny-field and blue-sky background for them! Skaertoft Mølle being a no-waste business, they wanted their bags to evoke the full cycle of organic farming. The face the design firm StudioMega came up with was indeed strikingly different.

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

The flour was an instant success. But then it was a complete departure from what had been available until then on supermarket shelves: organic, cool-milled on a slowly-revolving stone mill, it had better flavor. It also offered better nutrition: to keep mechanical influence to a minimum (thus protecting the integrity of the nutrients), the grain passed through the mill only once and distance from mill to bag was as short as possible.

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

Because of the varieties chosen, it had a higher protein content and better baking properties. "We have never mixed individual loads of grain. We have always relied on the quality of the single batch. This means that we have single-farm – sometimes single-field - traceability. We always visit our partners to check out storage facilities, take grain samples for analysis (protein, gluten, ochratoxins, baking test), to discuss crop rotations and our needs for grain, but we never make contracts. We only accept the highest quality – a promise we’ve made to ourselves never to be compromised. The farmers accept and respect this, because we also pay a higher price for the grain. When the quality of our own harvest is not good enough we sell it as animal fodder." Skaertoft Mølle started with five types of flour in 2004. Today it offers about thirty products, flour and grain combined.

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

Skaertoft Mølle published a cookbook and a bread book, started offering bread baking classes, was awarded three esteemed prizes, began cooperating with an organic company in Germany, introduced fresh organic yeast to the Danish market and launched an annual Bread & Food Festival. The Skaertoft story truly has all the makings of a Danish fairy tale, especially when one doesn't stop to consider the enormous amount of work and energy that made it come true.

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

And like in all good fairy tales, it has its dark moments. One year "we had a catastrophic harvest. And land prices halved over night. And the same year sales stagnated. Completely. And we were totally unprepared for that. ... Other mills were now making stoneground flour – and they were building bigger plants with packaging machines – and not relying, like us, on manpower and hand-packed bags. They made what appeared to be similar products but at a much lower price. And supermarkets love that. So we were no longer in that very privileged situation of being “alone” on the shelves."

Photo courtesy of Skaertoft Mølle

Hard times helped the family grow yet another set of eyes: the mill was separated from the farm and turned into a shareholding company. They started looking for other outlets for their flour and grain, both in the food service industry and in supermarkets other than elite ones. As hard as it was, they also decided to lower their prices. The family and the mill workers (most of them women) labored flat out for two years with minimal payoff in economic terms. But they never compromised on quality and it worked: Skaertoft Mølle has acquired new customers, come up with new products for both elite and regular supermarkets, entered into new deals in the food service market, and set up shop online. It has also acquired a human face (or rather three): "We are no longer just bags - we have been on TV commercials and have become 'the family' in people's minds and that has been an important change." The shareholding arrangement has brought in funds: next step is the purchase of a packaging machine to decrease costs and provide a healthy working environment. New products and exports are in the works. The morale of this modern-day fairy tale? "Looking at bread though new eyes can take you a long way!" Indeed.

Photo courtesy of Skaertof Mølle

Chad Robertson's Danish Rye Bread

I see my quest for Danish rye bread as a Proustian endeavor (if Proust could conjure a bygone world from a morsel of madeleine dunked into lime-flower tea, why couldn't I bring back to life a beloved chunk of the past with a slice of bread?) but as such, of course, it might be doomed: Proust himself knew from experience that long-ago days cannot be summoned at will and that involuntary memory alone has the power to revive them.
Still, he wrote this which I hold to be true:  "When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." 
I would so love to access forgotten memories of the summers spent in Denmark in the 60's and early 70's with my mother-in-law Sigrid and her stepmom, Bebbe, back when we still lived in France. Our kids were barely out of babyhood (our youngest wasn't even born yet) and we split our time between a tiny wooden cabin at the beach, lost among heather and pines, and Bebbe's apartment in an old and quiet neighborhood near Copenhagen.
I don't have many photos of these days (we were on a tight budget and film developing was expensive) and the few I have are mainly of people. So most of the images are in my head: the silvery wings of an old windmill against a deep blue sky, fields of wheat undulating in the sea breeze, a feisty dachshund jumping up and stealing our two-year's old's round lollipop as we walked home from the grocery store, a tiny courtyard full of flowers and an even tinier kitchen with a white-painted half-door through which Bebbe could be seen frying endless platters of frikadelle (meatballs), pickling gherkins (syltede asier) which we loved to eat with almost everything, making rabarber grød (a buttermilk-based cold rhubarb soup) and generally doing her best to keep us well fed and happy.
I can still see the apartment with the high-back dark red velvet Victorian couch, the finches waiting for crumbs on the leafy balcony, Bebbe herself in her old-fashioned silk dress and lace collar, the evening tea we drank in tall china cups and the endless rounds of rummy we played at night once the kids were in bed.
Bebbe lived to be 103 and kept her wits to the end. She credited the iced shot of aquavit she had with lunch every day for her general good health. That, and her daily pint of room-temperature dark ale as well as the rye bread that accompanied every meal.
I was never one for hard liquor and I didn't appreciate beer back then. So I don't have any taste or smell memories associated either with the aquavit or with the ale but Bebbe's house is where I discovered rye bread. Of course I had had some in France, mostly on festive occasions when oysters appeared on the table. But that French pain de seigle had in no way prepared me for the chewy, grainy and fragrant dark marvel that formed the base of the open shrimp sandwich (smørrebrød) Bebbe had prepared for my very first lunch in Denmark. It was love at first taste.
Whether at the beach or in the city, she had a favorite bakery where she always bought her bread. I knew nothing about bread then and certainly didn't have the slightlest inkling that one day I would be into making my own, or I would have taken pictures, interviewed the bakers, asked to see their surdejg (sourdough), jotted down recipes and bought rye berries to bring back to France. But I could identify artisan rye bread with my eyes closed just from the smell of the slowly fermented grain. Supermarket bread (which we tried once when we ran out and the bakery was closed) didn't even come close.

I haven't been back to Denmark in ages and of course everything would be different anyway if I visited again. So making a rugbrød that would, à la Proust, revive the taste and smell of these Danish summers and maybe recall the voices of the two women who lovingly wove these memories together for us seems like the only way back...

While I have yet to find a rye bread that quite does the trick, Chad Robertson's Danish rye bread comes close. We had friends from France staying with us when I made open sandwiches with it. Both are well traveled and have been to Scandinavia and immediately after taking a bite, they exclaimed: "Danish rye bread!". So the taste is definitely there. Sort of. Although the bread isn't nearly as fragrant as the one I recall. It may be because Chad uses a wheat levain. I am pretty sure the rye bread we had in those long ago summers was made with a rye levain. I'll try making it again and see.

Still, with a bit of smoked wild Alaskan salmon, a dollop of crème fraîche from British Columbia (brought to me the other day by my friend breadsong  and easily the best I have ever had on this continent) and a spray of fresh dill, Chad's Dansk rugbrød makes a lovely smørrebrød. It doesn't awaken old memories but it makes me smile as I imagine Bebbe giving it a try and pronouncing it americansk but good before methodically downing her aquavit.

On the technical side, I was a bit worried that the rye berries wouldn't be soft enough to incorporate in the dough if simply soaked overnight, so I soaked them for 24 hours before draining and rinsing them. Since I had an unexpected scheduling conflict and couldn't mix and bake as planned, I put them in the fridge for another 24 hours. When I looked at them, they had started to sprout. Knowing I wouldn't have time to bake for another couple of days, I put them in the freezer. I took them out the night before I mixed the dough. I made sure all the ingredients were at room temperature when I started, even the buttermilk and the beer.
My 9 x 5.5 " bread pans were a bit too small for the amount of dough the recipe yielded. The breads clearly wanted to rise higher and couldn't. Next time I should probably make two and a half loaves. Although maybe I should first see if I get the same rise out of an all-rye starter...
Chad Robertson's Danish Rye Bread is going to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.