I began baking rye bread twenty years ago when I moved from Denmark to the small town of Marshal on Tamales Bay in Northern California.

Living in the United States with my young family there was only one thing that I truly missed from home: the satisfying heartiness of Danish Rye Bread. Inspired by memories of the smells of my grandmother Anna’s kitchen, I slowly developed a sourdough starter and recipe to make bread that would sustain my family. Gradually, interest in our community developed and in 1994 I began a small commercial bakery, Anna’s Daughters’ Bakery, using the residual heat from a local bakery’s wood fired oven.

Today, I produce the same rye bread from that same starter I created over twenty years ago. I prepare the bread each Sunday night with my husband, Michael, using all organic ingredients. Most importantly for the quality of my bread, I use grain specially selected from a local distributor, and then stone ground in small batches by a local mill. Stone-ground grain gives my bread its uniquely wonderful texture and added health benefits. On Mondays, after the dough has fermented overnight, I bring it to the small San Francisco kitchen, La Cocina, to bake.

I hope that you enjoy my traditional Danish rye bread and that it can help to sustain your life as it has mine.

 

-Marianne Wiener, Owner and Baker

 

 

 

 

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Chad Robertson and Elizabeth Prueitt, owners of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco sell and are fans of Anna's Daughters' rye. Chad says, "I've been eating Marianne's bread for more than a decade now. It's a truly remarkable whole grain rye. I like my whole grain bread moist, well fermented with natural leaven, and not too sour. Anna's Daughters' Rye has a perfect balance of these qualities and keeps well throughout the week. These loaves have sustained me on many travels."

Straus Family Creamery owner, Albert Straus says, “It’s a local, organic bread that reminds me of the dark, dense breads my father loved so much. Anna’s Daughters’ Rye Bread takes me back to my childhood.”

Maurice Kanbar, New Yorker, inventor and founder of SKYY vodka says, “My mother made all our bread every week and not since my childhood have I tasted such a good European-style rye bread. Not only does Anna’s Daughters’ Rye Bread taste wonderful but because it’s made from stone-ground, organic grains, the texture and flavor is superb. I have it a ‘two thumbs up’."

Saveur Magazine called Anna’s Daughters’ Rye Bread “WONDER BREAD!” and featured Marianne Weiner and her bread in a full page story in the September/October 2001 issue.

Saveur

No. 54

Sept./Oct. 2001

Page 34

Wonder Bread

A California-based Dane re-creates the dark, dense rye of her childhood

 

Weighing just under three pounds a loaf, Marianne Wiener's homemade rye isn't your grocery sandwich bread. "It's like a brick," the Copenhagen native cheerily admits. Wiener began selling her dark, ultra-dense loaf by mail in 1996, about ten years after moving from Denmark to Marshall, California, on Tomales Bay in Marin County, to be with her then fiance. Having grown up on this traditional northern European style of bread, made of coarsely ground rye berries, Wiener was dismayed by what she found on bread counters in the United Stares. "Horrendous!" she says. "Here, flour is made from bad grain, with roller mills, which can burn the grain. Then, the most nutritious part, the germ, goes to the pigs'" (Because the germ contains oils that can go rancid quickly, it is removed from commercial flours.) American rye bread is also typically lightened with other flours and can contain as little as 15 percent rye. Homesick for the real thing, Wiener decided to make her own bread. It took nearly three years just to get the sour-dough starter right. Meanwhile, she found a North Dakota farm that grew organic rye and a stone mill near her home that would grind the grain , germ and all. (Wiener's recipe combines about 90 percent rye with 10 percent wheat, "to hold things together", with a touch of honey and salt added for flavor.) The batter is proofed overnight, then baked in a wood-fired masonry oven. The result is a nutty-textured bread with an earthy sweetness. Wiener — who calls her business Anna's Daughters' Rye Bread (Anna was her baker grandmother) — sells 150 loaves a week, mainly to displaced northern Europeans." When they discover my bread," she says, "many of them cry." -CATHERINE WHALEN