Chernushka Rye Bread

Ingredients

Organic wheat flour (organic wheat, malted barley), water, organic whole rye flour, black caraway (chernushka) seeds, sea salt, yeast

Contains: Wheat

Made on shared equipment with products containing milk, egg, soy, pecan, sesame.

Shelf life & storage

The bread will ship with two business day shipping to ensure it arrives as fresh and delicious as possible. Once it arrives, the bread will last on the counter for a few days in its Zingerman’s bread bag. It does not need to be refrigerated – in fact, we recommend you avoid the fridge!

If you want to keep the bread for more than a few days your best bet is to freeze it. Double bag the whole or partial loaf in plastic and freeze for up to three months.

Reheating instructions

All of our full-flavored breads are completely baked all the way so reheating is not necessary. You can eat the bread right out of the bag (ripping pieces or cutting slices – no judgment here). But for a warm, crackly crust and a soft, chewy crumb, we suggest putting your loaf (whole, half, or part) in a 350 degree oven for approximately 15-20 minutes. For frozen bread, let it defrost for about 30 minutes before throwing it in the oven.

What Is Chernushka Rye?

The name comes from chernushka, the Russian word for the tiny black seeds more commonly known as nigella or kalonji. Derived from the Russian word for “black,” the seeds are strikingly dark and packed with flavor. Native to the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, nigella seeds aren’t related to black pepper, despite their pleasantly peppery bite.

Nigella has an unmistakable flavor that’s often described as a blend of thyme, onion, oregano, and a hint of licorice. Whatever words you choose, the aroma is captivating. While they’re best known for topping breads like Chernushka Rye, nigella seeds are equally delicious sprinkled over roasted potatoes, pasta, salads, or vegetable dishes. They also pair beautifully with warming spices in curries and are one of the five ingredients in the classic Bengali spice blend panch phoron, alongside cumin, fenugreek, mustard seed, and fennel.

Why We Love This Bread

Amy Emberling—co-managing partner at the Bakehouse and co-author of both the Zingerman’s Bakehouse Cookbook, where you’ll find our rye bread recipe, and Zingerman’s Celebrate Every Day—shares this memory:

“The floral and spicy aroma of this bread transports me back 40 years or so to my 10-year-old self… One regular stop on our weekly route was the childhood deli of my youth, Ike’s. While our Montreal smoked meat was being sliced and the adults had adult conversations, I happily explored the shelves full of unfamiliar foods and breathed in the aromas. I didn’t realize until I started baking this bread at the Bakehouse in the 1990s that one of those unforgettable scents was chernushka. It still brings me joy just to smell this bread.”

The Best Ways to Enjoy Chernushka Rye

The real magic, of course, is eating the bread. Chernushka Rye is a natural companion for corned beef, pastrami, smoked salmon, or grilled vegetables like spring asparagus. It makes an unforgettable BLT, and it’s equally delicious toasted with Zingerman’s Cream Cheese or a generous layer of cultured farmstead butter.

Don’t overlook it once the loaf is a day or two old. Chernushka Rye makes exceptional homemade croutons. Simply cube the bread, toss it with extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper, then bake until crisp and golden. They’re perfect for snacking, adding crunch to salads, or finishing a bowl of soup with deep rye flavor and the unmistakable aroma of nigella.

Most artisan breads are based on the same four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and a leavener. The first step to making great bread is to choose great versions of those ingredients.

Better Flour

Let’s start with flour. At Zingerman’s Bakehouse, the “house” flour is an organic AP flour that comes from a single mill in Colorado—most of it grown on a single farm. The bakers use more than 20,000 pounds of it each week. It’s included in baked goods from Farm Bread to Hummingbird Cake.

For many breads and pastries, the team at our Bakehouse also use locally grown, freshly milled whole grain flours. Many of those flours are milled in the bakery on the in-house stone mill, including the rye flour used in the Vollkornbrot and Roadhouse breads. The freshly milled flours are more variable and perishable, but used well they contribute exceptional depth of flavor.

Natural Leavening

Let’s talk about leavening, too. While some Zingerman’s breads, like Paesano and Sesame Semolina, are made with yeast, more than a dozen of our breads are naturally leavened. Naturally leavened breads are made without the addition of commercial yeast, relying instead on the “wild” yeasts present in the sourdough starters the Bakehouse team has been feeding daily since 1992. Zingerman’s naturally leavened breads range from the tangiest Better than San Francisco Style Sourdough to sweeter loaves like Cinnamon Raisin and Chocolate Cherry.

Time

The most important ingredient is one you’ll never see listed on a label: time. At Zingerman’s, making bread is a slow process. A loaf of Farm bread takes 18 hours. A loaf of Paesano bread takes a whopping 20 hours. All that time allows for incredible flavor development, the same way that a broth simmered all day has way more intense, complex flavor than one that’s only been cooking for a couple of hours.
Those flavorless artisan breads from other bakeries probably suffer from being made in just a few hours, not allowing enough time for flavor development. And incidentally, those bags of sliced white bread at the grocery? Thanks to industrial dough developers and oxidizers, they can go from raw flour to oven- ready dough in four minutes flat. No wonder they don’t taste like much!

Stone

The method of baking matters, too. Zingerman’s breads are baked in a stone hearth oven. The stone allows for more even distribution of heat, making for a crisper, more flavorful crust.

All the little steps add up. Zingerman’s breads are deeply aromatic, with complex flavors of grain. You really can taste the difference.

Photo credit: EE Berger

Why use preservatives in the first place?

The use of preservatives isn’t inherently a bad thing. The USDA’s shorthand definition of a preservative is any substance that slows or stops the deterioration of food. Our ability to preserve food like fruit and meats with sugar and salt has helped humans survive travel, famine, and long winters like we get in Michigan.

But it’s worth asking why we want to preserve a food, especially if the goal is more about convenience than quality. In breads and baked goods, for example, it’s not uncommon to see an antimicrobial like calcium propionate, which inhibits the growth of mold, or EDTA (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid – say that five times fast!), which keeps elements in foods like zinc or copper from being available to microbes that need them to function.

So, do we want to add calcium propionate and EDTA to a loaf of bread so that it will last an extra week on the grocery shelf and the grocer has an easier time handling the product? Well, perhaps we do if we’re the grocer. But in this case, it’s harder to see the benefit for the bread eater. A loaf of bread that’s been sitting on the grocery shelf for a week is never going to taste as wonderful as one that’s freshly baked, no matter how many preservatives have kept it from molding. The reason to add preservatives to baked goods is not to make them taste better. It’s to make them more convenient for the baker and merchant to handle while waiting for someone to buy them.

At Zingerman’s, we don’t add any preservatives to our breads or pastries.

This means they have a relatively short shelf life, usually somewhere between a few days and a couple of weeks. When we ship them we include a recommendation on how soon they should be eaten. You can also freeze them for a long time. But beware the refrigerator!

Why the fridge makes your baked goods go stale fast:

As a loaf of bread stales, its texture gets drier. This isn’t related to any moisture it may be losing. It’s because the chemical structure of the starches in the bread change. They become more crystalline with each passing day. This happens especially quickly at temperatures just above freezing. In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee references a study that showed that a loaf of bread stored in the fridge at 46° F got as stale in one day as another loaf of bread stored at 86° F did in six days. In other words, the fridge stales baked goods!

We recommend against storing our breads and pastries in the fridge. To prevent staleness, it’s best to freeze any bread or pastry you want to keep longer than a few days. Freezing stops the crystallization process.

To revive a bread or pastry that has started to stale a bit, heat it up in the oven or toaster. Heating decrystallizes the starches, magically returning the baked good to the moist, delicious texture it had when it first came out of the oven. To aid you in performing this magic trick, all of our breads come with heating instructions. They’re available on our website for handy reference, too.