Have a Good Recipe for Bosanski Kruh European Bread? Good Questions

Q: Recently I bought a loaf of the most wonderful bread. It was toothsome and dense with a beautiful shiny golden crust. The label calls it "European bread - bosanski kruh".

Only flour, water, yeast, and salt were listed in the ingredients, but it's very different from the usual "italian bread" or baguette. I've searched for a recipe, but the only ones I've been able to find are in Bosnian. Can anyone share a recipe for this lovely bread?

Sent by Erin

Editor: Erin, this sounds delicious! We aren't familiar with this bread and also ran into a language barrier when we tried searching for it, but we'd recommend checking out the book Flatbreads & Flavors by Jeffry Alfrod and Naomi Duguid ($15 on Amazon). I didn't see this exact recipe listed, but they have very good sections on Eastern European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern breads, so maybe you can find something that sounds similar.

Does anyone else have any clues - or better yet, a recipe! - about this bread?

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(Image: Flickr member breki74 licensed under Creative Commons)

Comments (5)

Hi Erin,
I was born in Bosnia and bread is very important in Bosnian culture. But I know that you can find anything from white to sourdough bread, many are very delicious. I do not have any recipe but if you want I can translate the recipes you found.

Another thing, "kruh" means bread, but in Bosnia you can also say "hljeb".

Greetings from Europe,
Amila

The bread's not the one pictured, right (no shiny crust there.) Is it a flatbread, like lapinja?

If it's eastern european, than you might consider that they use a different strain of yeast, a different variety of flour, a different type of oven or kiln and perhaps a different method of proofing the bread. The type of yeast along makes a dramatic difference in the final product. Did they use hard or soft water?

The shiny, chewy crust comes from a steamy oven while the bread bakes. This can be achieved by either setting a pan of water in the oven before preheating and leaving it in there while the bread bakes, or using a spray bottle to spritz all over the oven walls right after putting the bread in to bake.

The oven should also be preheated to 450 or 500 for an hour before baking, and if you can put the bread on a pizza stone or bricks, even better. Honestly, that old world flavor is hard to come by with a lot of the standard american ingredients and techniques we're used to. I suggest reading the book "Bread Alone," by Daniel Leader. He changed the way I bake bread ENTIRELY. Now I use a levain, use flour with germ, do extremely slow rises, ferment a homemade starter for a long time, etc. It does make all the difference in the world. Do come back and let me know how it works out!

I think this is the same delicious bread you can in supermarkets and Bosnian stores all over St. Louis (large Bosnian population) as "Bosnian bread." I found a couple of different links searching for "Bosnian bread":
http://www.belowtopsecret.com/thread141478/pg1
http://brandon.multics.org/doc/recipes/bosnian-bread.html

Hope that's what you're looking for! Whenever I visit relatives in St. Louis, we fight over the last piece.