Recipes

Baking - Rusks

Both Pat and I enjoy a rusk with our early morning tea, but store-bought rusks have become rather expensive, so about 10 or so years back we decided we should make our own.

Tannie Tobia gave me a recipe for buttermilk rusks, and over the years we have modified this recipe to suit our tastes. It hardly resembles the original recipe at all now.

Pat bought a baking tray, specifically made for rusks, through one of her colleagues. This tray had an insert which fitted into the tray, through the dough, which created "equally" sized rusks. Unfortunately, this insert did not last very long, so we had to use another method to cut the rusks. The rusks have to be cut to size early in the baking process otherwise it is too hard for a knife to penetrate.

Ingredients

• 500ml Buttermilk (or 400ml water) - we use water these days as the buttermilk tended to inhibit the action of the baking powder
• 250g Margarine (or butter)
• 2 Eggs
• 1 kg Self raising flour
• 1cup Crushed All Bran Flakes
• 10ml Baking powder (20ml seems to work better)
• 5ml Salt
• 100g Sunflower seeds
• 200g Brown Sugar
• 50g Coconut
• 125g Sultanas (the yellow ones are nicer)

Method

As the mixer's bowl is too small to take all the ingredients at once, we weigh them off in two batches.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then add the butter, eggs and water. The easiest way to do this is in a food processor which has a dough hook. Pat's 40 year old Bosch Food Processor does the job admirably.

Once you have a decent consistency to the dough mix, place it in a baking tray and spread it to fill half the tray. Try to spread the layer to an even thickness (this is not as easy as it sounds, as the dough is rather sticky).

The process is then repeated for the second batch.

Place in an oven at 180°C and bake for 30 minutes. Once the 30 minutes is up, remove from the oven and cut the rusks to size (here we use part of the old insert as a template for size).

Bake for another 30 minutes at 180°C.

Separate the rusks and lay them on their sides. You will need another tray in order to spread them out a bit. Dry them in an oven at 100°C for about 3 hours.

Enjoy!

(11 August 2023)

Recipes