A love letter to the humble daily delight of knäckebröd

Growing up in the northern inlands of Sweden, in the gothic fairytale landscape of Hälsingland, crispbread was an integral part of my childhood. A universal truth I assumed was enjoyed in every childhood home. In the pine covered vale where I spent my formative years, the local crispbread was Ovanåkersbröd, the bread of Ovanåker. It’s a DOP-type rye crisp, like the Parmigiano Reggiano of Italy, tasting of terroir and local culture. The making of Ovanåkersbröd includes heirloom crafts and sturdy, silent ladies staying up all night stoking large fires. It’s hard and chewy, dark and flavourful with a hint of bitterness from the wholemeal rye flour. Alas, it’s not great when you’re a kid.

Crispbread was also inherently tied to another local habit: the yearly fermented Baltic herring festival. I have vivid memories of the annual celebrations, when the entire community would come together for one night of smelly debauchery, gathering in the town and sitting along communal trestle tables that quivered under the weight of fish jars, to enjoy this delicacy together. The setup was strictly all-you-can-eat (if someone managed to finish a jar it was simply replaced), all condiments included.

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One of the most vital fermented herring condiments is crispbread. Not the local rye crisp though. For one night, and one night only, we would eat factory-made Gene flatbread by Polarbröd, the third largest manufacturer of crispbread in Sweden. It’s snowy white, wonderfully flakey and covered with fluffy bubbles that are slightly burnt on top. So once a year, I would gorge myself on this most wonderful flatbread, topping it with a couple of fingers of butter and the teeniest, tiniest speck of fermented herring, only enough to appease my parents and make it look like I was having dinner. Eventually I did grow to love Ovanåker’s rye crisp too, forever associating the flavour with home.

I’m far from alone in my love of rye crisp – it cuts through almost all levels of Swedish society. Generous stacks of traditional round crispbread mark the high festivals in the mansion, and make for a cheap lunch in the cottage. It can be eaten with, or instead of, any meal of the day. When my parents ran out of granola they would simply take a handful of rye crisp and crush it over a plate of curdled milk and raw lingonberry jam. It’s surprisingly tasty. Especially if you can sneak in a teaspoon of sugar or two.

Sweden used to be dotted with crispbread bakeries, supplying the local markets and tastebuds with regional flavours. But as modernity swept the nation, artisanal bakeries lost out to larger bread factories. Crispbread was considered a poor man’s diet. Bigger companies would buy smaller bakeries and shut up shop, a development that has continued until the present day, when the market is dominated by large crispbread factories like Fazer/Skogaholm and Polarbröd. But there are still exceptions. Like Skedvi bröd.

Skedvi rye crisp is made in the village of Skedvi, and baked in the same way today as it was at the start of the 20th century when the small artisanal factory launched. The bread is hand-baked in large wood-fired stoves in ancient looking bakeries that also happen to be the modern day workplace of Riina Myrsell.

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Riina has been the manager of the bakery for the past five years, but she’s not a baker. “I do everything except for baking,” she says. “We’re a small company, if someone’s sick I’ll be stacking bread boxes or chopping wood.” Because whatever happens, someone will always be chopping wood on Mondays. After the wood piles have been replenished, the fires are lit and stoked until all the stoves reach an ideal basic temperature. And then the baking begins.

On the day when I speak to Riina there’s morning frost on the grass outside the bakery, which makes her very happy. “We’ve had three months of humid weather, when usually we only have one,” she says. The humidity affects the dough, causing it to rise in unpredictable ways. As temperatures drop, the air gets drier and the bakers happier. Crispbread is, after all, supposed to be crispy. “People think making crispbread is easy,” says Riina. It is not.

Back home in Ovanåker, the old baker ladies would talk about baking only twice a year: the summer bread was made in early spring, and the winter bread in late autumn. It was a whole thing. Riina is familiar with the pattern. “You know in old houses, there’s often a horizontal pole above the iron range? That’s where you would hang the bread. Partly to keep it away from four legged creatures, but also to keep it crisp,” she says. “You’ll always be cooking, the heat rises from the range and dries the bread.” That way it will stay crisp throughout the year. That’s also why there’s a hole in the middle.

This durability is unique to crispbread. At Skedvi there’s a box of 65-year-old bread. “It tastes fine,” Riina says. “A little stale, but absolutely fine.” The wholemeal rye flour is another pro of crisp rye: roughage is linked to good health, it’s great for the stomach and it’ll keep you feeling full longer.

So how can you tell great crispbread apart from the mediocre? Riina, a trained sommelier, tells me to search for roasted flavours. Artisanal bread will have a deeper flavour and more complexity, compared with bread baked in electrical ovens. “It’s like choosing between a run of the mill Pinot without an AOC, and an artisanal Pinot from Burgundy,” she says. You’ll pay more for the latter, but every step of the process will be marked by gentle attention.

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As food culture evolves, rye crisp moves with its times. For a rustic-elegant apéro snack, Riina suggests placing a large rye crisp round on the table, roughly breaking it up and serving it with a rich dip, like skagenröra. This mirrors another crispbread snack of my youth. Whenever there was roast chicken served in my childhood home, the fat would be scraped off the bottom of the baking tray and kept in a jar in the fridge. This chicken butter, of sorts, would be sprinkled with salt and scooped in generous amounts onto small pieces of rye crisp. It is a wildly indulgent morsel.

So, what about drink pairings? Riina doesn’t hesitate. ”Champagne!” The rye crisp will bring out the bready flavours in the Champagne and the fatty topping – whether it’s cheese, skagenröra or chicken butter – goes well with its acidity.

Before we finish our conversation Riina mentions knäckebrödsbältet, the rye crisp belt. I ask her what it is and she tells me it’s the rye crispbread heartland of the country: Dalarna, Gästrikland, Hälsingland. “If you go further north, there will be flatbread. And in the southernmost parts you’ll start seeing Danish rye bread, which is dark but soft,” she says. So as it turns out, what I always assumed was a nationwide obsession with rye crisp is actually an expression of a local love of this very particular bread. I had no idea. It always just seemed perfectly normal to me. Like a universal truth.