Slow bread, rye flour on everything, and a starter called Greta.

For two years my everyday loaf was a straight white sourdough with ten percent wholemeal. This summer I started swapping some of that for whole rye, a little more each week, and I think I have landed: fifteen percent rye, seventy-six percent water, twenty percent starter.

The rye does three things I like. The crumb holds moisture for an extra day, the crust darkens faster so I can bake a little cooler, and the flavour gets that faint cocoa note that I associate with the bread my grandmother bought from the bakery on the corner. What it takes away is some of the open, glossy crumb. At fifteen percent I barely notice; at twenty-five I definitely do.

Every Swedish kitchen used to have round crispbread hanging on a pole above the stove, with a hole punched in the centre so it could be threaded. I do not have a pole, but I wanted the shape, so I cut the holes with the rim of a shot glass.

The dough is almost nothing: whole rye, water, a spoon of starter for flavour, salt and a few caraway seeds. The trick is rolling it thin — really thin, two millimetres — and then using a notched rolling pin, or in my case a fork, so it does not puff up in the oven. Bake hot on a preheated steel, then leave the oven door ajar at a low temperature for an hour to dry everything out.

They keep for weeks in a tin. With butter and a slice of aged cheese it is the best breakfast I know.

Two weeks of twenty-seven degrees inside the flat and my starter turned into a different animal. She peaked in three hours instead of six, collapsed shortly after, and smelled of nail polish by the evening. Nothing was wrong with her; she was simply hungry faster than I fed her.

The fix was boring: a stiffer starter, fed one part starter to five parts flour and four parts cold water, and kept in the coolest corner of the kitchen. That brought the peak back to about seven hours. On the hottest days I fed her straight from the fridge water jug and let her sit in a bowl of cold tap water.

The chart in the starter section above has the before and after. The 1:5:5 line is the summer feeding; it is slower to start and peaks lower, but it holds the peak for a good hour, which is what you want when you are also at work.

Cinnamon buns are not a sourdough bake in any traditional sense, and the yeasted version is perfectly fine. But I had a jar of active starter and an afternoon, so I tried a hybrid: a cooked flour-and-milk paste for softness, a small amount of starter for depth, and still a pinch of fresh yeast so the second rise does not take all day.

Cardamom goes in the dough, freshly crushed — not the pre-ground dust from the supermarket, which tastes of cardboard by comparison. The filling is soft butter, brown sugar and a lot of cinnamon. I twist and knot them the way the cafés here do rather than rolling them into snails, which is fiddly the first ten times and then becomes a meditation.

The result was a little more tender and stayed soft until day two. My neighbour, who is a reliable critic, said they tasted "more grown up". I will take it.

I have baked in a heavy cast-iron pot for years. It is foolproof: the lid traps the steam from the dough, the crust stays soft long enough for the loaf to spring, and then you take the lid off and let it colour. The downside is that you can only bake one round loaf at a time, and dropping a dough into a 250-degree pot is how I got the scar on my wrist.

This spring I bought a thick steel plate and tried open baking with a tray of lava rocks for steam. After eight bakes my honest verdict: the steel gives a better bottom crust and lets me bake two batards side by side, but the oven spring is a little less dramatic unless I am generous with steam. For a single everyday loaf, the pot still wins. For a weekend double bake, the steel.

Limpa is the sweet, spiced rye loaf that turns up on every Swedish Christmas table and then quietly disappears for the rest of the year. I think that is a shame. It is wonderful with a sharp cheese, and it toasts better than any other bread I make.

My version uses a scald: rye flour whisked into boiling water with dark syrup, ground fennel, aniseed and orange zest, left overnight. The next morning it goes into a dough with wheat flour, starter and a little butter. The scald gelatinises the rye starch, so the crumb is moist and slightly sticky in the best sense.

Bake it in a tin at a moderate temperature and brush the top with a mix of syrup and hot water right as it comes out. Then — and this is the hard part — wrap it in a towel and leave it alone until the next day.

Every recipe gives you a time for bulk fermentation, and every one of those times is wrong for your kitchen. The planner on this page gives you a starting estimate, but the dough has the final word.

What I look for now: the dough has grown by about half (I use a straight-sided container with a strip of tape), the surface is domed and has a few bubbles at the edges, and when I tip the container the dough moves as one jiggly mass rather than sliding like batter. If it is still tight and flat, wait. If the dome has started to sag, shape immediately and shorten the cold proof.

In January my kitchen sits at nineteen degrees and bulk takes almost eight hours. I have stopped fighting it and just start earlier.

Saffron buns on the thirteenth of December are not optional in this house. I make the dough the evening before with a long cold rise, so in the morning I only need to shape the little S-curls, press a raisin into each end and bake.

The saffron is ground with a sugar cube in a mortar and bloomed in warm butter — it makes a startling difference to the colour. This year I added a spoonful of quark to the dough, which I picked up from an older neighbour, and the buns stayed soft all weekend.

We ate them at seven in the morning, still dark outside, with candles and too much coffee. Lucia did not visit, but the buns were good.

People ask, so here it is. Greta started three years ago from nothing but whole rye flour and water, mixed in a jam jar and stirred twice a day. Rye is the easiest flour to start with: it is full of wild yeasts and enzymes, and it ferments quickly even in a cool kitchen.

The first few days were dramatic — a big rise on day two that turned out to be bacteria rather than yeast, then nothing at all for three days, which is when most people give up. On day eight she started to double reliably, and by day fourteen she could raise a loaf. I switched her to a mix of rye and wheat after the first month.

She lives in the fridge between bakes and gets fed once a week whether I bake or not. Two friends have a piece of her now, which I find unreasonably pleasing.

When the evenings start to get dark at seven, I want heavier bread. This one folds a cooked porridge — oats and rye flakes, simmered in water and cooled — into a regular sourdough at about thirty percent of the flour weight.

The porridge brings a lot of extra water, so the dough feels stiff at mixing and then loosens dramatically as you fold it in. Do not panic and do not add flour. Extra folds during the first two hours give it the strength it needs. The finished loaf has a custardy, almost creamy crumb and keeps for five days without going stale.