A recent conversation with a friend at the table in our breakfast nook brought this subject up. He had stopped over to sample some of my sourdough rye bread and to take a couple loaves home. He was telling me about the rye bread a friend of his Grandma used to bake. He had obtained the recipe after her death from the daughter. The daughter had mentioned she had tried many times but could not make it come out right. DJ mentioned his Mom and Grandma had tried it and could not get it just right.
My mind rewound to something from years ago, my brother loves homemade bread, but he had told me one time that it was good, very good, but just didn’t taste like Grandma’s bread did and he was right. He wanted to know if I had Grandma’s recipe, but she never used one that I ever seen, not for just plain old white bread, she just mixed it up, they way I do it, a couple tablespoon’s of lard, maybe a teaspoon or so of sugar, a dash of salt and work in enough flour for a stiff dough.
Well as I started traveling around with my cook camp, I noticed that my bread tasted different at different places, not a lot, but it was different, none of which was exactly like Grandma’s. I realized the places I went to had well water, and depending on where it was, it tasted different. I also remember a class I had on water treatment years before I remembered something from the class, a lot of national brands of many items uses water treatment to make them taste the same where ever they are made. I also remembered Grandma’s bread was never quite the same after she moved to town.
What I did the next time we were hunting at the farm was to use the water out of the well. The well has very old pipes and a slight nitrate level, not serious, but we just haul our drinking water from Lincoln and refill at the neighbors who has a much better well. At supper time, my brother went over to the dutch oven full of bread, got himself a couple large pieces, covered it with butter and took a bite. The look on his face was priceless, “you did find Grandma’s recipe!” I had to tell him again, there was no written down recipe I’d ever seen. “You had better remember what you did different, this is Grandma’s bread.” I explained what I had done and now when I’m at the farm I use the water from the well.
So back to my friend and the bread he wants again 40 some years later. The lady who made the bread lived just west of Lincoln, in an area that had wells at the time. I have a co-worker who lives a short distance from where the lady lived, and my friend has a well, I have 2 one gallon jugs of water from her well. I tasted it; it is different from Lincoln water which comes from over 40 miles away. Lincoln’s water requires very little treatment and tastes almost exactly like water from wells in that same area with no treatment, but it does taste a noticeable difference from the well water I now have.
DJ explained the bread of his youth as best he could, on Thursday I will try to see if I can duplicate the bread, seems like a simple half steel ground rye, half white (He remembered it called for blended flour, (a half and half mix that used to be sold locally.) with no caraway or other seeds and a very small amount of sugar, he remembers it has just a little from the recipe, perhaps a teaspoon of white sugar.
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