leftover

Winter Bread

December 22, 2016


A traditional Finnish Christmas bread is marked with a cross on the top, sweet and full with spices. A good addition is leftover mash as many Finns are brewing kotikalja (a malty low-alcohol, home-made table beer closely resembling kvass) for Christmas. This is one version of these breads, which are lovely addition to breakfast breads throughout the winter.

1 bread 

2 dl (200 g) mash and 1,5 dl (150 g) water 
or 3 dl (300 g) boiling water and 0,5 dl (40 g) rye malt 
30 g fresh yeast 
1 tsp salt 
1 dl (140 g) Scandinavian dark syrup (or light molasses) 
3 tsp Seville orange peel powder (bitter orange peel powder) 
2 dl (230 g) sugared lingonberry mash 
2 dl (100 g) rye flour 
9 dl (500 g) dark wheat flour 
50 g butter 
For the glaze: 
syrup water (half and half) 

Stir the yeast, salt and syrup into the lukewarm mash and water mix. Add Seville orange peel powder and sugared lingonberry mash. Gradually mix in the flours and knead the dough for couple of minutes. Add soft butter and knead for further 8 minutes. 

Cover and leave to rise at room temperature for 30 minutes. 

Line a baking tray with parchment paper. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it gently. Take a piece of dough aside. Form the rest of the dough into a round loaf and place it on the baking tray. Decorate the bread with the piece of dough you set aside using water as a glue. 

Cover and leave to rise for 30 minutes. 

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Brush with syrup water and bake for an hour and 15 minutes. Brush with syrup water after an hour again and the third time 10 minutes later. 

Cover and let cool on a wire rack.



malt

Top 3 Christmas Breads

December 09, 2016

Islander Bread


Almost every baker here in Finland knows this classic recipe, because Islander Bread is The Christmas Bread here in Turku and all over Finland. Everyone must have a loaf or two waiting for the dinner on Christmas Eve.

Islander Bread is a perfect match with smoked ham, fish, home-made fresh cheese or gouda. Or, why not to try it with blueberry jam and goat cheese?


Christmas Bread


This festive rye bread combines all the best parts of Christmas, almonds, dates and dark chocolate. How could you resist it? What's more, you can bake this bread with sourdough starter or with yeast.


Finnish Christmas Loaf


I bake Islander Bread for Christmas, but my family likes traditional Finnish Christmas Loaf too. So, I have a habit of baking the latter in November. This is a lovely bread as such, but also a delicious toast for breakfast.

no-yeast

Turnip Rieska

October 26, 2016


One of the joys of autumn is a hot turnip rieska topped with melting butter. I have a craving for it at the latest in October, and it won't go away until I have looked up my old, trusted recipe and baked them.

6 pcs.

1 turnip (250 g)
1 tsp salt
1 dl (100 g) buttermilk
0,5 dl (45 g) cooking oil
2 dl (110 g) rye flour
2 dl (130 g) wheat flour

Peel the turnip and cut it into cubes. Bring a pot of unsalted water to a boil. Add the cubes and cook until tender. Mash with 0,5 dl (50 g) of cooking water and let cool for a while. 

Stir all the ingredients together. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and shape it into 6 thin, round breads. Line two baking trays with parchment papers and place the rieskas on them.

Preheat the oven to 225°C. Bake for 15 minutes. 

Enjoy the rieskas straight out of the oven topped with butter.

rye

Lohja Loaf

May 13, 2016


Apple buttermilk loaves are traditional breads from Lohja, a small town located in the province of Southern Finland. You don't find these loaves at groceries, but sometimes food vendors sell them at fairs.

3 small loaves 

2,5 dl (250 g) buttermilk 
5 dl (2 cup, US) unsugared apple mush 
1 dl (140 g) Scandinavian dark syrup (or light molasses) 
40 g fresh yeast 
1,5 tsp salt 
8 dl (450 g) rye flour 
7–8 dl (400–450 g) dark wheat flour 

Blend the lukewarm buttermilk, apple mush, syrup, yeast and salt together. Add 8 decilitres of rye flour. Knead for couple of minutes. Add dark wheat flour as necessary and knead briskly another 8 minutes. 

Cover the bowl and set in a warm, draft-free spot until doubled in size. 

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it. Shape the dough into three small loaves. Line a baking tray with parchment paper, place the breads on it, cover and leave to rise at room temperature. 

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Poke the surface with a cake tester or bamboo skewer and bake for about one hour. 

Brush the breads with syrup-water mix. Transfer to a wire rack, cover and let cool.

no-yeast

Sultsina

March 24, 2016


Sultsina pasties are part of a traditional Karelian cuisine. Our family started to bake them when my grand aunt got a daugher-in-law from eastern Finland in the 1960s. Now they are beloved part of our family celebrations.

The original family recipe calls for unleavened rye dough and semolina porridge. I prefer rice or pearl barley porridge. I have filled sultsina shells with potato, wild mushroom and smoked fish salad too. Maybe not sultsinas anymore, but delicious! These variations have been a huge hit among my friends. 

I have also taken liberties with the shape of sultsinas. I make cones because they look prettier than the traditional shape.

18 pcs.

Shells:
4 dl (220 g) rye flour 
1 dl (65 g) wheat flour
1 tsp salt
2 dl (200 g) cold water

Filling:
2 dl (200 g) water
2 dl (170 g) short grain rice
1 L whole milk 
1 tsp salt 

Glaze: 
50 g butter 
1 dl (100 g) milk 

Combine the flours, salt and cold water. Shape the dough into a round ball. Cover the ball with plastic wrap an put it in the fridge.

Start to cook the porridge. Place the rice in a fine mesh sieve and rinse under cold water. Bring 2 dl water to the boil. Stir in rice and cook until water has completely evaporated. This takes couple of minutes. Pour milk into the kettle, reduce heat to a low simmer and cook for another 40 minutes. Turn off the heat and stir in salt.

Make the shells while the porridge is simmering on the stove, but remember to stir the porridge once in the while.


Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it softly, for just a moment or two. Roll the dough into a rope. Cut the rope into 18 pieces. Shape each piece into a ball. Press to flatten. Roll out each ball into a 15-cm (6-inch) circle. Make them as thin as possible, but don't worry about the perfect shape. Some roughness looks good.


Sprinkle generous amount of flour between each shell and make an overlapping pile on the table. Cover the pile with plastic wrap.


Melt the butter and add milk into it.

Brush the excess flour away and place one shell on a cast iron pan or a griddle. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes, until bottom turns color. Turn over with a flat spatula and cook until light brown spots appear on the underside. Brush only the other side of each shell with butter-milk mixture and pile them buttered sides against each other. Cover with foil and cloth. 

Place some of the filling on the buttered side of each shell and roll them all up into cones. Serve immediately.


malt

Islander Bread

December 21, 2015


Bread recipes on this blog are usually my own. But, the exception confirms the rule. I simply must publish this classic recipe which almost every baker here in Finland knows, because Islander Bread is The Christmas Bread here in Turku and all over Finland. Everyone must have a loaf or two waiting for the dinner on Christmas Eve.

 Islander Bread is a perfect match with smoked ham, fish, home-made fresh cheese or gouda. Or, why not to try it with blueberry jam and goat cheese? 

2 breads

1 l (1030 g) buttermilk
75 g fresh yeast
1 tbsp salt
3 dl (420 g) Scandinavian dark syrup (or light molasses)
3 dl (60 g) wheat bran
3 dl crushed rye malt
3 dl (165 g) rye flour
10 dl (650 g) wheat flour
For the drizzle: 1 dl (0,5 cup US) syrup water (half and half)

Stir the yeast, salt, syrup, wheat bran, crushed rye malt and flours into the lukewarm buttermilk. Pour the mixture into two greased 2-liter tins. 

Cover and leave to rise at room temperature for 1,5 hours. 

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Bake for 1 hour. Cover with foil if necessary. Bake for a further 30 minutes. Drizzle the loaves with syrup water. Bake for a further 30 minutes without the foil. The loaves might be fully baked at this point. If not, take them out of the tins, drizzle with syrup water and bake for a further 10 minutes.

Cover and let cool on a wire rack. When cooled, wrap the breads tightly and store in a cool place for 2-3 days. If you are in a hurry, you can serve the breads the next day. The taste is irresistible!

Store in a cool place where Islander Bread will keep up to 8-9 days. Storing Islander Bread in the freezer is a great solution too.

traditional recipe

Bread was Facebook of the 1930's

November 30, 2015


Kakko, ruisleipä and pulla
- the breads of Metsämäki Farm in the 1930's

My grandmother's sister, Tyyne Metsämäki, recalled baking bread for the first time at the age of ten in the 1930's. She was born in Huittinen, a small agrarian village in Satakunta, the oldest historical province in Finland, located on the southwest coast of Finland. 'Kakko' (basic white sourdough bread) and 'ruisleipä' (rye bread) were typical breads of the region.

 Rye bread was eaten at mealtimes. Kakko was part of breakfast or coffee break. Fresh buns were the delicacy of Sundays. Good housewives were always prepared for unexpected visitors too. They had rusks (twice-baked buns known as 'vieraskorppu') for the neighbors and strangers who stopped by the farm. 

 Home-baked bread was the rule. Crispbread, which was a commercial bread, was a rarity. Tyyne was in her teens when she bite crispbread for the first time.

 Sunday treat

 If the work load at the farm allowed, the weekly baking day was Friday or Saturday. This meant fresh bread for Sunday. 

 But, it all started in the middle of the week, when someone carried flour sacks from the cold granary to the warm kitchen. All flours were homegrown. Every two weeks one of the men took a horse and drove to the Korkiakoski Mill, which grinded the grains of the farm to bread flours and animal feed.  

 In the evening women took out a large, poorly scraped wooden baking bowl and mixed some flour and water in it. The dried dough from the previous baking day on the sides of the bowl worked as a sourdough starter, when the bowl was covered with a cloth and let stand in a warm place. The starter dough was ready in two days. If the weather was cold, as it often was, it was difficult to start the process. It was time to put some commercial yeast into the starter dough. If it was late, the grocery was closed. Fortunately, the local shop owner let bakers come to his home and led them through his kitchen to the grocery and sold them the much-needed yeast.

 Couple of days later, early in the morning, 2 – 3 women started to bake by pouring two buckets of water (20 liters) into the baking bowl. Then, no measures, just the rule of thumb when they were measuring flour and salt. Sometimes they added some anise seeds into the dough, but spices were valuable rarities because they were something they had to buy. Honey, syrup or other sweeteners were never used.

 The dough was huge, but one vigorous baker tackled the task all by herself. It wasn't customary to take turns.

 Tyyne always shaped some pieces of the dough into loaves "because they tasted better, or so we all thought", but most of the dough were shaped into round, more or less flat breads with holes in the middle to facilitate storage on long poles hanging near the ceiling. This was understandable because they baked four bread boards in a day and one board took 30 breads, total 120 breads per day. An inconvenient place to store the breads? Not really, some breads were always stored in the plaited root basket in the red kitchen cabinet, where they were easily available.
















Baking oven baked 30 breads in one go 

 The wood-fired brick oven was heated with two chambers of wood. If the oven was "lazily heated" they threw bunch of birch leaf fodders into the chamber, after which the kitchen smelled great.  

When the coals were swept out and the chamber was cleaned with a birch twig broom, it was time to bake the first test breads. An experienced baker was usually capable of estimating the heat of the oven and the first batch of breads went into the oven right after the test breads. If the oven was too hot, it was swept with a wet broom before the breads on the first board were loaded into the oven. 

In the Autumn fish dealers were driving around countryside from one farm to the next selling salted Baltic herring in barrels. It was a valued delicacy, which explains the fact that almost every baking day the last bread they took out of the oven was the Baltic herring bread. In the falling heat of the bread oven they cooked rosolli casseroles, potato casseroles with Baltic herring, Karelian hot pots and pearl barley porridges. Two weeks before Christmas men slaughtered a pig during the baking day and women made sausages stuffed with pork and pearl barley.

There were no such thing as food waste 

There were lots of workers on the farm, the regular maids and farmhands as well as occasional hired workers in harvesting and other labour-intensive agricultural production phases. It was quite common that there were 20, often more, eaters around the table.

Bread was an integral part of every meal and 120 breads were quickly dwindling away.It was common to put butter and fried pork on the bread. "Lettuce was for sheep". Cucumbers and tomatoes were not eaten until the 1950's, when they started to grow these vegetables on the farm. Fresh cheese was placed on the plate, not on the bread. 

There were no such thing as food waste. If there sometimes were a bread or two left on the next baking day, they were treats for horses and cows. 

Bread and hospitality  

Freshly baked bread was an essential part of hospitality. Workers often got a warm bread for their families. Two neighbors got three breads each and "father always took a bread for the shoemaker, who lived at a distance from us". If somebody unexpectedly dropped in on the baking day, they got a bread too. 

 Not a day went by without guests and visitors when harvesting and other autumn tasks were done. The weeks before Christmas were particularly buzy, because it was important to spin all the linen before the New Year. But, they went to see neighbors and received guests all the time anyway. Guests were welcome delays. It was time to put a coffeepot on the stove, serve kakko and rusks and talk through the latest news from the village.

 Nobody was left without freshly baked bread. Old and sick people who lived alone and others who were unable to bake got bread from their neighbors. If someone didn't want to depend on neighbors, Iita Paunu, a well-know village banquet caterer, came over to their house to bake bread for them.

 Bread was the Facebook of the 1930's, a social networking service, which brought family, friends, acquaintances and strangers together and provided them with a possibility to communicate and tell the latest news. 

Chain of bakers

 When I'm baking I have this lovely feeling of being part of the long chain of bakers in my family. I started to bake with my granny at the age of five and now I'm baking with my 6-year-old son, who loves to bake.  


malt

Cast Iron Pot Bread

August 25, 2015


This is my weekend bread because it takes a while until it's ready, but the taste is worth every minute. 

 Do you already have a sourdough starter? If not, it's easy to make by yourself. Here's a no-fuss sourdough starter recipe for you.

1 bread

First day

Starter dough:
1 dl (100 g) sourdough starter 
1,5 dl (150 g) lukewarm water
1,5 dl (100 g) wheat flour 

 Mix together the sourdough starter, water and the flour. Cover with a tea towel and leave at room temperature for 7–9 hours.

Water and spelt mixture:
1,5 dl (150 g) water
1,5 dl (100 g) spelt grains

Boil up the water and spelt grains. Set aside to cool. 

Flour mixture:
4 dl (400 g) cold water
18 dl (1150 g) wheat flour
1 dl (50 g) graham flour
0,5 dl (30 g) rye malts for bread (flour)

Stir together the water and spelt mixture, 4 dl cold water and the flours. Set aside for 30 minutes.

Starter dough mixture:
10 g fresh yeast
1 tbsp salt
1 dl (70 g) crushed rye grains
starter dough

Blend the yeast, salt and crushed rye grains with the starter dough. 

 And finally, the dough:
Combine the flour mixture with the starter dough mixture and knead gently for 5 minutes. Place in an oiled bowl. Cover with a tea towel.

Stretch and fold the dough for the first time after 60 minutes. Stretch and fold 3 more times in 30-minute interval. 

Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise at room temperature overnight.

Second day

Next morning, turn the dough out onto a floured work surface. Lift the sides of the dough and fold them gently back towards the center a few times. Shape the dough into a loaf and put it into an oiled bowl. 

 Cover and leave to rise for 2 hours.

 Place a lidded cast iron pot in the cold oven and preheat it to 250°C. Remove the lid from the pot and flip the risen dough into the hot pot. Place the lid back on top and put the pot back into the oven. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove the lid, turn the temperature down to 200°C and bake for a further 25 minutes. 

 Let cool on a wire rack.

leftover

Kvass

August 21, 2015


Sometimes we all have an old bread (or two) in our kitchen. It's always a joyful challenge for me because I hate throwing away food. I try to find smart ways to use these leftover breads up. I will also post these recipes to my blog even though they are not baking recipes.

Non-alcoholic bread beer, kvass is brewed from dried rye bread.

7 l (7 kg) water
500 g rye bread 
2 dl (170 g) sugar
fresh yeast

Cut the bread into slices and place the pieces in the oven heated to 175°C. Take them out when they are dried.

Place the dried rye bread pieces in a large pot and pour 7 l of boiling water over them. Cover the pot with a lid and leave it at room temperature overnight. 

Carefully and slowly pour the liquid into another container through cheese cloth.

Add 1 dl sugar into the liquid. Caramelize the rest of the sugar (1 dl) and add it into the liquid too.

Put a pea-size piece of fresh yeast into every one-liter bottle. Pour the liquid into the bottles. Let rest at room temperature for 5–7 hours.

Store the bottles in a cool place away from direct sunlight. The kvass is ready after 3 or 4 days.



no-yeast

Traditional Finnish Rye Bread

March 25, 2015


As a child I thought that the neighbour of my grandmother was a strange man, because he was washing his bread. We don’t wash our bread! Well, he wasn’t either. He used to eat rock-hard, dried rye bread, which became chewy and edible with water.

 This has been a well-known practice in Western Finland, where almost every housewife had bread poles on the roof beams of the kitchen for her rye breads. There are still kitchens, where you can find them. The house of my grandmother’s mother is one of them. Women baked lots of thin rye breads especially in the fall. They were well preserved on the poles until the following spring and in the kitchen they were always conveniently within reach. 

 3 breads

 First day, evening

 1 dl (100 g) sourdough starter
2,5 dl (250 g) lukewarm water
2,5 dl (150 g) organic rye flour 

Mix together the sourdough starter, water and the rye flour. Cover with a tea towel and leave at room temperature (24–26 °C) for 12–20 hours. Next day the mix should look brisk and bubbling, which tells you, that it’s ready.

Second day

1,5 tsp salt
2,5 dl (250 g) lukewarm water
the starter dough from the evening before
6–7 dl (330-380 g) organic rye flour

The following day, blend the salt with the lukewarm water. Stir together the starter dough and the liquid. Mix the flour into the dough and knead until firm and well bound together, for about 5 minutes. Cover and leave to rise at room temperature for 6 hours.

Turn the dough out onto a baking surface and divide it into three balls. Flatten each piece into a thin disk on a parchment paper. Make a hole in the center of each dough disk with a glass. Poke the surface randomly with a fork. Place the ring on a baking tray with the help of the paper. Cover with the cloth and let rise for 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Bake for 30 minutes or so.