The bread rolls were based on a granary-type flour (Maltstar from Stoate's Mill in Dorset) to which I'd added some mixed grains and black-strap molasses. One of these filled with whatever takes our fancy makes for a substantial lunch on our Dartmoor walks.
The rye bread is a sort of pumpernickle. I say 'sort of' because a true pumpernickle would be made with a sour-dough rye culture but this one doesn't. I got the recipe from a blog run by a couple of Dutch baking enthusiasts (Weekendbakery.com) and they call it Frisian Rye bread or Fries roggebrood. It's an easy bread to make but takes about 4 days (12 hours in the oven!) to reach the cutting and eating stage. It's very dense and, at the end of kneading, it's more like moulding clay than shaping dough - weird if you are used to working with high gluten flours such as wheat. Sliced thinly and topped with humous, it's pretty good. And infinitely better than the cardboard rye bread you can buy in your local supermarket. Variants on the basic recipe include the addition of caraway or cumin seeds but, quite honestly, they are an unnecessary elaboration.
How does it compare in taste to 'proper' pumpernickle? I've baked a couple of pumpernickles using rye sour-dough and, yes, they did have that characteristic acidic tang. But the recipes were more involved and time consuming and, in my opinion, did not repay the extra effort with extra flavour. Having said that, they were great fun to follow and produced an impressively dark product. But take care not to drop them on your toes! Light and airy this type of bread is not.
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