Life in Münster, and Jan Hedh’s graham nut raisin bread

My life in Münster is so different from the one I left behind in Berlin. Münster is so different than Berlin; It is small, wealthy, and probably the whitest city I have ever lived in. Of course, Münster has its immigrant population, but it seems to be hiding, limiting its existence to an appearance in the Wikipedia article. The natives, on the other hand, who do their week-end grocery shopping at the farmers’ market on the Domplatz with their big baskets in hand (which I am sure they ordered online from the Britishshop.com), look as if they had stepped right of a Polo Ralph Lauren catalogue (no offense, Elena). The typical Münsteraner seems to be around sixty, is white-haired, and dons a Barbour wax jacket as well as Tod’s leather shoes. The wife, of course, wears pearl earrings, and after Mass on Sunday –which they of course attend because along with the rest of the population, they are Catholic – they take their Sunday coffee at one of the quaint and elegant cafés downtown. (Despite their quaintness and elegance, tea at Krimphove is served with coffee creamer!)

There is another sort of typical Münsteraner, and that one is much younger. It is a student, and from what I can tell from the first week here, he or she, like their seniors, wears Barbour or Burberry jackets, pearl earrings, and Ray Ban glasses – because, after all, we are the hipster generation. They spend their free time getting drunk by the lake and dancing gangnam style. I have been told those are the law and business students – and that they cool off after freshman week. I really hope so.

But not just the people are different; it feels as if life has a different pace here. Life feels smaller, slower, not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that will take some getting used to. Last Wednesday, I did my grocery shopping at the farmers’ market and it started pouring, as it does quite frequently here. Instead of hushing through the rain, trying to run their errands as quickly as possible and with grim faces, people simply sought refuge in shops and waited for the rain to pass! (I don’t know for how long, I ran my errands as quickly as possible, and rushed back to my office, my head under my coat. It was still raining when I got back to the office.) Part of the reason why life feels slower here is that you don’t depend on public transportation or, worse yet, cars – you ride your bike, and everyone has one. In fact, after learning that I didn’t have a bike yet, my neighbor’s parents brought me my neighbor’s old bike to use until I get mine from Berlin! Münster without a bike makes no sense, they exclaimed, and so, now I have one! The city is so small that you can bike just about everywhere in fifteen to twenty minutes, and usually even less than that.
The other reason why my life feels smaller here is, of course, that I hardly know anyone in the city, so my social life is somewhere between small and non-existent. I know that this will change, and I am very, very grateful for my neighbors, who are super nice and welcomed me as warmly as I could have wished for. But for the time being, whenever I am not at the office, I am alone. This and the fact that I have neither internet nor a regular phone or even cell phone right now presents the challenge to find something to do and occupy my mind every time I come home. I started learning Spanish – yet again, but with more determination – and I read a lot, both for my dissertation and for fun. And I bake. My kitchenette is small, there is barely enough space to put down a ladle between the stove and the sink, let alone space to bake. So I figured that I should make the best of the situation and bake things that are less complicated – and usually healthier, too – i.e. bread. I may have mentioned before how much I love kneading bread dough; kneading a solid yeast dough, turning a sticky dough into a smooth and elastic one by kneading and kneading and kneading, and gradually adding more flour (usually too much, as I am impatient) while listening to the Les Choristes soundtrack works miracles, and it turns an apartment into a home.

So, with the help of Bruno Coulais and Jan Hedt, a Swedish baker and author of “Swedish Breads and Pastries,” that Allie gave me last summer (THANK YOU!), I set out to fill my apartment with flour and bread love.

I don’t know if it’s a Swedish thing (I had never heard of it before), but this particular bread is a “scalded” bread, meaning you start with a “scalding” of flour, salt and water, which you then let rest for a day. I assume this is to add a natural fermentation process as well as flavor, but I may be wrong. The rest of the recipe is actually fairly simple; you just add the flour, honey, yeast and milk mixture and the nuts and raisins the next day and give the dough time to rise. The major difficulty for me was to find a substitute for graham flour. I had read up online on Graham flour a while ago and knew that the closest approximate in Germany is Weizenschrot, shredded wheat. I don’t think I ever baked with graham flour in the U.S., so I wasn’t sure what it’s supposed to look like, but I have a hunch that Weizenschrot isn’t quite the same. So for this recipe, I ended up adding a lot of white flour because otherwise I didn’t think that the gluten would have had any chance to develop. (The gluten structures need the white stuff from inside the grain to develop – they are what gives the bread texture when it rises. This is the reason why whole wheat bread needs much more time to rise than white bread.) The original recipe calls for walnuts, but I used hazelnuts instead and liked it a lot. You can also substitute the raisins with prunes or apricots, but I was quite happy with the raisins. I think the reason I like breads like this one so much is that they always remind me of home – the flavors of my childhood and my mother’s baking. And don’t be fooled by the raisins: this is not a sweet bread. It could be enjoyed with either a nice goat cheese or with quince jam, as I did.

Jan Hedh’s Scalded graham bread with walnuts and raisins

For the scalding (Day 1):

125g (1/2 cup) water

60g (1/2 cup) graham flour

2 teaspoons salt

For the dough (Day 2):

150g (1cup) raisins

200g (7 ounces) scalding – comes out to just about the right amount

450g (3 ¼ cups) graham flour, OR: 300g Weizenschrot (mittel gemahlen, im Reformhaus erhältlich), 150g weißes Mehl

1 ½ tablespoons honey

75g (3/4 cups) butter

150g walnuts or hazelnuts

Day 1: To make the scalding:

Boil the water, pour it over the flour and the salt, and stir until smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit until the next day at room temperature.

Day 2: To make the dough:

Soak the raisins in cold water for about 30 minutes.

Combine the scalding in a bowl with the flour and honey. Heat the milk until it is luke warm and dissolve the yeast in it, then pour it into the bowl. Knead the dough for about five minutes at the lowest speed and add the butter in batches. Knead for another ten minutes. Knead longer and add more flour if needed.

Drain the raisins and fold them into the dough along with the nuts. Put the dough into a lightly oiled (or buttered) plastic container covered with a lid to rest for 45 minutes.

Push the air out, let rise again – I gave the dough a good three to four hours total to rise, but it will be less if you use more white flour, as I recommended above.

Form the rolls, and let them rise for about fifteen minutes, sprinkle them with water and bake at 250C/480F.

Enjoy with strong cheese or flavorful jams (or both!).