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Foodie - Chef Joanita's Mother's Health Rusks

Foodie - Chef Joanita's Mother's Health Rusks

Author: Kasia Yoko
Date: 2017-09-22

This week's recipe comes from Beverly Hills Hotel's Executive Pastry Chef Joanita Venter. Spring is a really noble time to start thinking about healthy snack alternatives. It is also a fabulous time to enjoy the early morning cuppa with a slice of crunchy rusk.

While searching for origins of the traditional South African rusks, I came across some interesting discoveries, for instance that eating stale bread was the norm in ancient Europe. Ancient Roman soldiers are said to have carried a hard bread known as biscoctus, literally meaning 'twice cooked'.

The sub-continental cake rusk may very well be a descendant of the ancient biscoctus. Food historians mention that recipes for foods named rusk began showing up during the reign of Elizabeth the first.

The Oxford English Dictionary mentions that the word 'rusk' which dates back to the year 1595, when referring to a twice baked bread. While Alan Davidson says inThe Oxford Companion to Food: "Rusk is a kind of bread dough incorporating sugar, eggs, and butter. It is shaped into a loaf or cylinder, baked, cooled, sliced and then dried in low heat until hard." Rusks have a very low water content and keep well for extended periods. Sharing a common origin with the modern biscuit, medieval rusks were known as panis biscoctus, meaning twice-cooked bread, and were used as provisions for armies and ships at sea.

In many countries there are breads that may resemble rusks, in that they are essentially oven-dried bread, whether plain like the Italian bruschetta or of a sweet kind, like the cake rusks of pre-Partition India. However they may incorporate other ingredients such as spices like cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg and even nuts.

Ingredients:

500g margarine (personally I would use butter here as margarine is so bad for our health but it is a personal preference)

375ml brown sugar

500g flour

2ml salt

25ml baking powder

300ml bran

175ml raisins

500ml all bran flakes

300ml sunflower seeds

2 eggs

500ml buttermilk

Direction:

Melt margarine and sugar in a pot, be careful not to let it burn, leave on the side to reach room temperature.

Add melted margarine or butter and sugar mix into the dry ingredients,

Rub in properly.

Mix eggs and buttermilk, add to the crumbed mixture, mix well.

Divide into two pieces, press into two greased Swiss roll trays (or oven trays).

Bake for 45 minutes at C

Leave for few hours to cool down completely.

Cut the rusks, leave to dry in an oven at 70C

Enjoy this and please share your recipes with me email me thebugle@mweb.co.za