The hole had a functional purpose: the bread was baked in flat rings to be placed on poles suspended just below the kitchen ceiling to mature and dry in the relative warmth.

[1] Nowadays this kind of bread is available in all its forms and stages of aging throughout the whole of Finland, regardless of season, and is one main component of the Finnish diet.

Some flour, seed and even yeast remnants can top the bread; less moisture is present; and the texture is somewhere between gummy, unyielding and downright crackery, depending on age.

This reflects the bread's role as an indefinitely storable foodstuff which would last from the fertile summer through the relatively long and harsh northern winter.

In the process it then acquires a peculiar culinary quality: it starts off as rather sour and earthy in taste, but by the time it is ready to be swallowed, amylase enzymes in the saliva have already broken down enough of the starch in it to make it sweeter.