About

Having moved from Germany to San Francisco a few years ago, the main thing I was missing here was the German bread. While I actually really like San Francisco Sourdough bread, I don't like to eat it all the time. Yes, there are a few German bakeries in the area, but each of them had one or maybe two breads I really like.

So on my last Christmas trip to Germany, I decided to try out baking my own bread and bought a recipe book. I'm not a baker at all - OK, I baked a few cakes but that's pretty much it. In fact I had never made a bread myself, besides maybe a couple of times using pre-made bread mixes. I also don't own any sophisticated equipment, we have a regular household kitchen.

So I made sure the book I bought was made for rookies like me. What I found, was "Rustikale Brote aus deutschen Landen" by Gerhard Kellner, which is excellent. It's made for people exactly like me, you don't need any special equipment and the language is understandable for regular people. You can only buy the electronic version on Amazon.com, if you happen to be German, Amazon.de is selling the print version of the book. But you can also just go to his website ketex.de (German only), where you find all the recipes posted here and more.

The one major challenge was to find all the different types of flour used in German bread baking, especially when it comes to rye flour. Oh, one word about that. It appears that Americans often think that they don't like rye bread (I'm speaking from experience here, my wife was the same way). What you actually probably don't like is caraway seeds, which for some odd reason seems to be in almost every rye bread you can buy in the US. I indeed hate caraway seeds but almost all the breads I have made so far contain a fair amount (up to 100%) of rye.

So I started baking a different bread every week starting in January 2013 and I haven't bought a single bread since then. It turned out to be much easier than I anticipated, it's also not always a lot of work. Turns out the planning part is the biggest challenge since German breads appareantly need a lot of time to rest.

It's totally worth it though, so go give it a try.