Buttermilk Rusks
South Africa
Rédacteur en chef
London, United Kingdom ·
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London, United Kingdom ·
Rusks are twice-baked South African biscuits, dried until hard and dunked in coffee or tea. Dipping is not optional and not a matter of taste: a properly made rusk is too hard to bite comfortably, and softening it in a hot drink is how it is eaten. The method is what makes them. A soft dough, closer to a scone than a biscuit, is baked into rectangles, broken apart and then returned to a very low oven for around twelve hours to dry out completely. That second drying is the whole thing, and it is why rusks keep for weeks in an airtight tin. Buttermilk gives the characteristic tang and reacts with the raising agents to keep the crumb open enough to dry through. The most famous South African rusk brand began in 1939 in Molteno in the north-eastern Cape, where a woman baked rusks from a family recipe during the Depression and sold them to local farming families. It grew into a national brand and a household name. **This recipe is a generic buttermilk rusk recipe, not that company's recipe**, and it is titled here as buttermilk rusks for that reason. The slug and URL are unchanged.
Rusks are twice-baked South African biscuits, dried in a low oven for many hours and conventionally dunked in coffee or tea. Commercial rusk baking in South Africa dates to the late 1930s in the north-eastern Cape.
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Preheat the oven to 200°C.
In a large mixing bowl, thoroughly mix the dry ingredients.
Combine all the wet ingredients, pour them into the dry and stir until you have a soft dough, similar to biscuit dough.
Turn the dough onto a well floured surface and roll or pat it out to about 1cm thick.
Cut the dough into rectangles about 5cm by 10cm.
Bake on a buttered baking sheet, spaced about 5cm apart, for about 25 minutes, until the tops are crisping and lightly browned.
Pile the rusks loosely on a baking sheet and keep them in a very low oven, around 95°C, for about 12 hours to dry out completely.
The finished rusks should be very dry and hard. Cool and store in an airtight container.
Notes personnelles de Nympha Nzeribe4 avis
chale 745 minutes drying time is no joke oo! I bought the buttermilk from Tesco here in Croydon but couldn't get coarsely ground whole wheat, so just used normal brown flour. The cinnamon aroma in the house was top tier paa, but I think 1cm thickness was a bit too thick once the baking powder did its work. Next time I will roll it thinner before cutting the 5cm by 10cm rectangles.
My South African neighbour in Garland brought these over last winter and I finally made them myself. I ran out of buttermilk so I used whole milk with lemon juice from the Fiesta market down the street. That mix of vanilla and almond extract gives the exact same rich aroma her batch had. Great crunch for dunking into coffee o.
745 minutes cooking time almost scared me off abeg! But I realized most of it is just for drying the rusks in the oven so they turn properly hard for dunking. The smell of the vanilla and almond extract together while baking at 200C was so nice o. My children ate half the tray before they even finished drying sha.
I was curious about combining almond extract with cinnamon since back home in Ethiopia we lean towards cardamom for dry spiced bakes. Couldn't find coarse whole wheat flour at the PCC here in Seattle so I used standard whole wheat and added a handful of bran. The dough came together nicely like a soft biscuit dough. Dried them overnight on low heat and the texture for dipping in morning tea is perfect.