Not everyone comes home from a trip with a compulsion to recreate a bread recipe. I get that. But the dark rye breads in Finland were doing something I couldn’t stop thinking about. Once an idea takes root, I can’t let it go. I have to work it, figure it out. That’s how you end up with a bread recipe as a souvenir from the Arctic.

The breads there stopped me. Dense, serious, not trying to be anything other than what they were. Built to carry smoked fish or egg butter without disappearing underneath it. I kept coming back to them, which usually means something is going to follow me home.

I didn’t come back with a recipe. More like a direction.

The first attempts were simple and rye-heavy — close in spirit, not quite there. Which is fine. That’s how it goes. I can’t leave things alone once they get in my head, so it kept moving. Coffee and cocoa came in. Then a rye scald to build flavor and hold moisture. Malt syrup. Toasted caraway. Sourdough became part of the structure. Water eventually dropped out entirely and got replaced by coffee, and from there I started working through different coffees to see what shifted.

Each pass made it a little more itself. Not by adding more things, but by understanding what each piece was actually doing.

This is where it is now—a Neo-Nordic Rye. It’s still changing — it always is — and I adjust every time based on how it looks, feels, smells, and tastes. 

Writing it down feels a little like closing a door, which is why I tend to resist it. But this is a snapshot, and a snapshot is honest enough.