Rye à l’Ikea, or Bread From a Box

Since the advent of Ikea, everything you could ever need can be carried home in a cardboard box. I didn’t realize until my last trip that this extends to authentic Swedish rye bread.

I’m not opposed to the idea of Ikea as a food purveyor, and here’s an interesting fact: the Ikea Café in Red Hook is at the top of the list when you search for Brooklyn restaurants by customer rating on Menupages. While I’m sure this is not reflective of any real truth, I will say that Ikea has some good selections and has probably provided millions with their first taste of lingonberry jam and meatballs. I’ve had less mass-produced versions of some amazing dishes at Fika, a Swedish café in midtown, thanks to the generosity of my good friend who works there (theirs are not exactly “Ikea prices”), and I’ve found that the Swedes have figured out how to make food that is rich and satisfying without being stodgy, as I often find German food to be.

Shortly after that Ikea trip, I had another very Swedish day at the Midsummer Festival in Battery Park. The festival was truly idyllic: as we entered we were each handed a bunch of flowers on long stalks, and taught by a jovial blond woman how to fashion them into head garlands with ivy and twine. The lawns were flooded with flowery heads, and an epic tug-of-war game was orchestrated for the kids. People everywhere were lounging beside impressive picnics of potato salad, fresh fruit, and pickled herring on crisp rye bread. The vendors’ offerings looked extremely similar to what people had brought from home – an encouraging sign that it was authentic and carefully produced. We tried korv, a hot dog topped with skagen (shrimp salad with lemon and dill) and fried onions. The skagen was a perfect example of the Swedish talent of balancing richness with acidity (and, of course, incorporating seafood). A cold bottle of lingonberry Kristal was a welcome refreshment after a hot day of trekking through New York. We wore our flower wreaths on the subway home and enjoyed the attention they drew, and I wished that summer solstice happened more times each year.

After that afternoon, I was eager to produce some Swedish stuff in my own kitchen, and extremely curious about how successful the shake-and-pour process can be in producing satisfactory rye bread. Most of us have found that assembling the contents of Ikea boxes is not as universally foolproof as they want you to think, so I had a feeling the bread might not turn out to be exactly as advertised. But thankfully, this ended up being a relatively painless project. The 45 seconds of “vigorous shaking” after pouring the water into the carton were more strenuous than I had anticipated – a heavy, glutinous mass forms fairly quickly inside the container, but it’s important to keep agitating it to make sure that all of the dry mix gets incorporated. Then there’s the question of getting the goop out of the carton and into the loaf pan: a little daunting, but by hitting the sides and end of the box I was able to get most of it out.

After an hour in the oven, the dough (it looked more like batter, actually) had turned into a hot, dense block of oats and rye. The outside was very crunchy, but the inside stayed moist and somewhat chewy. It’s an incredibly hearty bread – not very useful for sandwiches, but delicious with butter and other spreads. It has a rich, nutty flavor that doesn’t really need anything added to make it an interesting snack.

So, bread from a box is a success, overall. Once again, the Swedes bring us good quality with easy assemblage.