Hveder Revisited

I wrote about my first experience with hveder around this time last year. That's because these special rolls are ubiquitous for Store Bededag or "Big Prayer Day," a national holiday in Denmark that fell on April 30 this year.

Last Thursday, the day before Store Bededag, I was at the supermarket when I noticed that virtually every shopper had a bag of hveder rolls in their hand.  Hveder is nothing more than a basic bread roll, but it is traditional to eat them on the holiday, and especially important to toast them prior to applying any toppings.

Well, either I don't follow rules well or like to mix things up a bit, or both, but I made my own hveder and, gasp, we ate them untoasted.

I'm sure the hveder we ate were unorthodox as well because I used regular boller (roll) mix sans grainy wheat flour.  But despite the fact that we ate white, untoasted, bread rolls (from a boxed mix) on Store Bededag, this French-American family felt in some small way that we were honoring this most important of Danish traditions.

The mix is a cinch.  All you do is pour the contents of the box into a bowl, add water and yeast, knead, rise, form into balls, rise again, brush with water or milk, and bake.

You'll notice that I used cake yeast, instead of the powdered kind. Nearly everyone here uses this type of yeast, where in the U.S., it's the opposite:  the powdered, rapid-rise kind is more popular.