Minsk is the capital city of Belarus. Minsk rye is a common rye bread in Belarus named after the city. And it is quite different to most of xUSSR rye breads because it is made using white rye flour instead of a more traditional dark wholegrain rye.

The recipe is known for quite a while now, I have it my Russian book from 1940, I saw it in many bread related blogs and it is present in Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker book as well.

This is probably the simplest sourdough rye bread recipe possible. It only has 3 ingredients: dark rye flour (type 1740, read more about rye flours in my previous post), water and salt. And it comes from a great book called 350 Varieties Of Bakery Products by Plotnikov and Kolesnikov published in 1940. It is the first recipe in the book and is used to describe several bread making techniques.

One important thing to note is that, as the name implies, this bread is sour. Very sour. If you’re not used to really sour rye breads, you might not like it. But this bread is a good starting point in learning how to bake rye.

As the name suggest, sourdough is nothing more than a dough which is sour. But why is it sour if two basic ingredients inside are only flour of some kind and water? And why is it bubbly and has a funky smell? Neither flour not water is sour, bubbly or have funky smell and mixing two together doesn’t result in any chemical reaction.

The answer is both very simple and very complex at the same time. Flour, like everything else in this world, contains many microorganisms which are hibernating on the surface of flour particles. Once one adds some water to flour, these microorganisms wake up and start eating, multiplying and, well, simply living their life. Let’s take a look at who they are and what exactly are they doing inside our sourdough.

Rīgas Rudzu Maize (Riga Rye Bread) is a common variant of rye bread in Latvia, it’s even got into Soviet GOST standards during Soviet times. But common doesn’t mean simple to make. It is a four stage bread (sourdough, scald, sour scald, final dough) which requires quite a lot of time to make, higher temperatures than usual, a special coating at the end of the process and a resting period of at least 12 hours. The reward for all of that is a loaf of a truly amazing bread, which is hard to find outside of Northern Europe.

If you’ve never tried a proper rye before in countries like Latvia, Russia or Finland, I would definitely recommend trying to bake this one. 90% rye content and scalding process make this bread completely different from what most of people in English speaking countries think about rye breads.