Tag: Russian Mennonite recipe

My Oma always made this bread for holiday feasts, so I’m giving it a try for Thanksgiving dinner.  While delicious, this version doesn’t seem a lot like hers, but she never used a recipe, so the secret is lost. I think she probably added a whole bunch of chicken fat.

I found several recipes in the Mennonite Treasury, that great cookbook that holds so many of the traditional recipes.  I used a combination of two recipes, choosing to use a yeast-raised version.  I mainly used the recipe for ‘Bubbat (with sausage)’ submitted by Mrs. Herman Neufeld.  Poor dear, with no first name of her own! To her recipe I added the raisins and prunes, some butter, and used much less sausage than the 1&1/2 pounds the recipe called for.  I set aside a bit of batter to make a small vegetarian loaf before mixing in the sausage.

What you need:

1 tablespoon sugar

1 package (2 & 1/4 teaspoons) yeast

1 egg

1 &1/2 cups milk

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup melted butter

3 & 1/2 – 4 cups flour

2 cups raisins and chopped prunes

2 cups chopped farmer sausage (if you’re in the Fraser Valley near Vancouver, the best is from Rempel Meats)

What you do:

1. Heat the milk until it just boils, then let it cool.

2. Dissolve 1 tablespoon of sugar into some lukewarm water then sprinkle the yeast on top. Let this sit for about 10 minutes, until it gets foamy.  If it doesn’t do anything that means your yeast is dead.

3. Once the milk has cooled, add the yeast, a beaten egg, melted butter and salt to it.  Stir in the flour to make “a soft dough that can barely be stirred with a spoon.” I think this means it is soft but firm… do what feels right! Add the raisins, prunes and farmer sausage.

4. Grease a large loaf pan very well with butter and pour the dough into it.  The cookbook asks for lengths of sausage to be pressed into the top, so you can do this if you want more meat in there.

5. Let the dough rise in a warm place for about an hour.  The cookbook does not specify, but I think it’s a good idea to put a clean tea towel on top of it.

6. Once the dough has risen,  preheat the oven to 375F and bake for 45 minutes.

One recipe says to serve it hot, but I don’t remember having it that way, so you can remove it from the tin to let it cool if you want, or serve it right away with some butter.