Photo by Katherine Harris
Sun Street Breads
While I was talking to cookbook author Robin Asbell on my radio show a couple weeks ago about grain trends, I asked the listeners for their favorite grain recipes not counting the big three of corn, wheat, or rice. The same answer flooded in from all over the region: Limpa, limpa, limpa!
Limpa? Of course I knew the Swedish rye variation, which translates unhelpfully as "loaf" bread. I know it particularly from national treasure and great Minnesotan Beatrice Ojakangas' classic Great Scandinavian Baking book, but hadn't realized it was living so big in our hearts. So I called up Solveig Tofte, head baker and co-owner of south Minneapolis' Sun Street Breads, who I know to be on the leading edge of different Northern bread conversations. Good timing, she told me, they're about to roll out Sun Street's own limpa bread for Easter, which they only make a few times a year. It will be available this weekend, the 24th, and then next weekend for Easter proper.
"Limpa is actually terrifically interesting because it's a million different breads right now," Tofte told me. "It's one of those immigrant foods that changed over the generations where it landed. Forever, I thought it had to have raisins and was sweet. But then I learned about an older way of doing it, that we do, called a vort limpa." A vort limpa is made using brewer's wort—that is, the liquid part of the malt-barley-and-water mixture you use as the first step in brewing beer. (There are other breads that use spent brewer's grains, but thats not what we're talking about here.)
"I learned about vort limpa when I was judging a [baking] competition in Lyons," Tofte told me. "The bread guy on the Swedish team, his vort limpa had anise, fennel, bitter orange, and fresh orange. That's how I make mine now, and there's nothing sweet in it, it's got bitterness and good rye flavor. If you don't add sugar those spices taste savory, and it's designed to be eaten with ham, I think. In any event it's really, really good with ham. When I taught a bread class at King Arthur that included limpa I went around the room and asked: What's limpa to you? I got so many answers. This one woman told me she was taking the class just because this woman at her church refused to give up the recipe for her own limpa bread. Then she took home a loaf of what I made and the woman from her church was so scandalized she gave up her secrets—she put marmelade in it!"
Marmelade?
"That's the beauty of being an American baker," Tofte told me. "We do what we want."
Of course, we are familiar with how, in America, Italian food morphed into Italian-American food, with giant meatballs covered with cheese floating on abundant oceans of pasta, and Chicago deep-dish pizza, and the like. We talk less about how Scandinavian food has morphed into Scandinavian-American food. Limpa bread seems like a great place to open up that conversation. What is limpa in your family? Something made with corn syrup? Something made with golden raisins? A blend of rye and wheat flours? A 100 percent rye bread? A yeasty, light, glazed bread? Something made with marmelade?
Other bakeries in the great state of Minnesota also make limpa. Swedish Crown in Anoka has it most of the time, though I'm told it sells out, and if you definitely want some, you better call ahead and reserve a loaf before driving up. Hanisch Bakery in Red Wing makes one, so does Duluth's Johnson's Bakery, and of course, regional metro treasure Taste of Scandinavia. And through Easter, Sun Street does as well.
But I think what I'd really like is to hear from the community at large—what is limpa to you? Post it in the comments, I'd really like to know.
Till then: Happy Easter all, and if you drop your limpa, may it always fall ham side up.
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