Geothermal Bakery · Steam-Baked Rye Bread

Rúgbrauð

Photo: The blanz / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

It's baked without an oven at all — the dough is buried in a pot near a hot spring and left to bake slowly from the geothermal heat of the ground itself.

A dense, dark rye dough sweetened with molasses or syrup is sealed in a pot and buried in hot volcanic sand near a geothermal spring, where it steam-bakes for about a day into a moist, faintly sweet loaf. Bakeries near Laugarvatn in South Iceland still dig loaves out of the ground for visitors to try warm.

Why it's made this way: South Iceland sits on some of the country's most active geothermal ground, and rúgbrauð's underground baking method turned that heat into free, reliable fuel for bread long before anyone had a wood-fired oven.