Catholic Recipe: Dark Rye Bread

Today we do eat too much — we eat too may things at one meal; we eat much too much meat; we consume an unhealthy amount of strong liquor and too much coffee and tea, which are bad for our nerves; and (this is perhaps our deepest conviction) the bread we can buy in stores is not the daily bread we pray for in the "Our Father," but something on the line of soft, tender sponger rubber, white sponge rubber. It has made us return to the dark rye bread, the home-made rye bread we used to have in Austria. All our guests rave about it, and so we want to share our recipe with others.

DIRECTIONS

Dissolve yeast in 1 cup warm water until it starts to rise and make bubbles. Pour this on the flour. Add three more cups of warm water to the flour and stir until fluid is all soaked up. Then knead (with your own hands) until it is a firm, fairly stiff dough. Put in warm place to rise, covering it with a cloth. After two hours or more (depending on temperature of the room), the dough should rise to twice the size. Punch it down and knead for about 10 minutes again. Cover it up and let it rise again until not quite double the size. It will rise in a short while (1/2 hour to 3/4 hour). Heat oven to 350° F. Then put dough upside down on a flour-sprinkled cookie sheet. Make holes in the dough with a knitting needle (or something similar) while in the hot stove. Leave there for an hour, then "wash" the bread: take it half way out and brush it freely with water. Push back into oven for another quarter hour, turning heat down to 300° F. Then take it out. Makes 1 loaf.