About Rukki

Her bread was baked in the big farmhouse oven, many loaves at a time, straight on the oven floor once the fire had burned down. Mine is baked one or two at a time in an ordinary electric oven in a town flat. It took me years to stop trying to copy her bread exactly and to start understanding why it worked. This site is mostly the result of that.

I am not a professional baker, and nothing here is a rule. Rye flour changes from mill to mill and from year to year, kitchens are warm or cold, and every Estonian family seems to have its own way of doing almost everything. The quantities are the ones that work in my kitchen, with ranges wherever the honest answer is “it depends”.

The name

Rye in Estonian is rukis. Inside compound words it becomes rukki: rukkijahu is rye flour, rukkileib is rye bread, rukkipõld is a rye field. It seemed the right name for a site that is almost entirely about rye.

How the recipes are tested

I bake at least once a week through autumn and winter, less in summer when the kitchen is too warm for a slow sponge. Every recipe here has been baked many times, by me and by friends with other ovens and other flour. When a recipe changes, the reason goes into the notebook.

The small print

No ads, no accounts, no tracking, nothing to sign up for. The drawings are my own, made because I never got round to taking good photographs. There are no comments; friends know where to find me, and corrections from people whose grandmothers did it differently are always welcome.