Apricot whipped porridge--Aprikoosi-vispipuuro

When I posted last week about vispipuuro, one of my former host sisters, Kati, said that the apricot version is really delicious.  My husband worked from home today, so it was a nice afternoon snack for us, with enough left over for the kids.  Maybe.

I looked at Beatrice Ojakangas' recipe in The Finnish Cookbook, but she added a whole cup of sugar!  This seemed excessive to me, so I consulted her recipe, but modified it to eliminate the sugar.

I sorted out the apricots from an extra-large bag of dried fruit from Sam's club, but only had a half cup, and the recipe called for a whole cup.  So I added in the dried peaches from the bag and had just enough.  Since the peaches are already not as sour as apricots, I decided to completely eliminate the added sugar by cooking the fruit in 4 cups of apple juice instead of water.  I cooked the fruit over low heat until it was so soft it broke apart when stirred.  This took about an hour.

Next, I measured how much liquid and fruit I had left, and it was just over two cups.  I added about two cups of water and about two cups of apple juice to make six cups total.  Then I brought this back to a boil and whisked in a half cup of cream of wheat (or you could use malt-o-meal).  Just like in the earlier post, I whisked this for a few minutes over medium heat until it thickened.

The thickened liquid then went into my stand mixer bowl, and I whipped it for a very, very, very long time (at least 20 minutes!).  I had a little trouble, it splattered a lot at the beginning, so I used a low speed until the chunks were broken up well, then gradually increased the speed.  I also used a splatter guard, but it splattered anyway!  Here is a photo taken after about ten minutes of whipping:

Eventually it was ok at high speed and I left it to whip, my big mistake.  When it started to get thick at the end, it started splattering everywhere, on the window, on the clean dishes in the drying rack, on the bananas laying on the counter...I won't forget this recipe soon--I'm sure I'll be finding random splatters to remind me for a long time!

This whipped porridge was even better than the one made with berries, and we didn't miss the refined sugar at all!

Whipped porridge--Vispipuuro

Tonight we had open-faced sandwiches with cheese and mushroom salad.  I needed something quick to make, I am almost finished with the sauna/bathroom/dressing room/closet tile floor.  The "quick re-tile project" that we started six months ago is almost completed--and we have moved a wall, moved a doorway, and completely re-framed, re-plumbed and re-wired the bathroom.  And we added a sauna!  It has been a long six months!  I've been in charge of drywall and tile these last few weeks, and have been neglecting my blogs.  Tonight I grouted most of the floor--I promise to post a photo in the next few days.

I was feeling a little guilty for spending so much time on the construction and leaving the kids on their own, so I made them a special dessert, vispipuuro.  This is basically Malt-o-meal cooked in fruit juice and then whipped.  They have been really curious about what I'm making, but I haven't let them in on the surprise yet.  I'm hoping it is a good one!

First, I took 3 1/2 cups of juice and brought it to a boil.  Traditionally, this would be lingonberry juice, but you could substitute cranberry.  Today, I used a really good pure juice that I found at Trader Joes, a blend of blueberry, cranberry and pomegranate.  The juice you use should be a little tart, for an authentic taste.  Raspberry would also be really good, I have made it with juice from wild raspberries when we visit Finland.

After the juice boils, stir in half a cup of Malt-o-meal (or cream of wheat, farina).

I cooked this for about ten minutes, stirring constantly with my whisk.  I found this plastic whisk at Ikea--it is great for use in non-stick pans.  You could cook it longer, but I think this is enough if you leave it to cool for about half an hour afterwards.

After the porridge cooled for about half an hour, I put it in my stand mixer bowl and whipped it for twenty minutes.  A stand mixer is so nice to have for projects like this.  I can just imagine women whipping it by hand with a whisk in the old days--I think this would have been a treat only for special occasions!  It changed color after only a couple of minutes, but kept getting lighter in color:

This is a really delicious and easy dessert (if you have a stand mixer!).  I served it in my Arabia Arctica dish that is part of the set we received at our wedding.  I love the simplicity of these dishes.  My husband's family gave them to us at our wedding, and my family carried the whole set back to the U.S. in their carry-on baggage!

When I tell the kids about their surprise, they will probably sprinkle sugar on the porridge in their bowls, but I'm not sure that it is necessary.  My husband insists that you should NEVER eat it with milk, but a bit of cream or whole milk tastes good with it, in my opinion.  We have to agree to disagree on that point.

Hope you enjoy this as much as we do!

A Traditional Finnish Christmas menu, starting off with Rice Porridge and Fruit Soup

We had a very peaceful Christmas Eve, but I am a little behind in my blog posts!  My goal this Christmas was to make all of the traditional Finnish Christmas foods at some time in the celebration.  There were too many to make all at once.  I found a great traditional menu in Finnish here.  This is a Finnish home economics website, and the purpose of the menu was to provide completely homemade recipes to keep expenses down, which is perfect for me because I don't have access to pre-made Finnish foods.  It even included a printable shopping list!

Our menu for Christmas Eve and Christmas day included:

Rice Porridge (or Pudding)--Riisipuuro

Fruit soup--hedelmäkeitto

Beet salad with sour cream dressing--Rosolli

Pickled Herring

Cold Smoked Salmon

Boiled Potatoes

Christmas Rolls

Ham with Prune gravy--Kinkku + luumukastike

Rutabaga casserole--Lanttulaatikko

Carrot casserole -- Porkkanalaatikko

Potato casserole -- Imelletty perunalaatikko

Strawberry Fluff--Mansikkahyytelö

Christmas prune tarts--Joulutortut

Mead--kotikalja

Glögg

So we started out Christmas Eve celebration with rice pudding and fruit soup.  The kids love this, their favorite part is trying to find the almond hidden in the rice.  Whoever finds it gets good luck.  The youngest found it this year, as usual!  

The fruit soup may be more traditionally made with just raisins, but my family likes mixed fruit better, the mixed fruit came later to Finland.  I used a bag of mixed dried fruit (containing pears, apricots, apples and plums) and added some extra raisins to it.  The dried fruit soaked for several hours covered in water before cooking.  I like to use some apple juice in place of some of the water just to sweeten it.

To make the rice porridge, I used sushi rice, don't use the regular rice that they sell in the U.S., it lacks the talc needed to thicken the pudding.  Pearl rice from the Mexican food section would also work.

First, I put 2 1/2 cups of rice in a pan and briefly washed it.  Then I added 2 cups of water and boiled it for 5 minutes.  Watch it carefully while boiling, this isn't much water, and it is really easy to burn it, like I did the first time!  At this point, add 7 1/2 cups of whole milk, and cook for 45 minutes over low heat, stirring constantly.  This dish takes a lot of patience!  It is very easy to let the milk caramelize in the bottom of the pan.

While standing and stirring and stirring and stirring...I started cooking the fruit soup.  After it boiled about half an hour, I mixed a couple tablespoons of potato starch (you could use corn starch) with a half-cup of water and stirred this in to thicken the soup.  This is how it looked:

At the end of the cooking time for the rice porridge, I added a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of ground cardamom, and a couple of Tablespoons of sugar.  The cardamom and sugar are my own additions, not traditional, but it really makes the porridge delicious.  Next, I added one almond, and it was ready.  The two younger kids like to eat their fruit soup separately and put cinnamon sugar on their porridge, just like their Famo and Faffa (Grandma and Grandpa in Swedish) serve it, the rest of us enjoy the fruit soup on top of the porridge.  Growing up, my husband's family ate rice porridge every Saturday evening, but we save it for a special Christmas treat.

We also enjoyed cold smoked salmon and pickled herring with crackers, it was a delicious start to the Christmas festivities!

Ohraryynipuuro, Barley porridge

Yesterday I made a wonderful porridge made of Barley.  This is one of my all-time favorite dishes, but I haven't eaten it for 28 years!  When I was an exchange student, I first stayed with a terrific, welcoming family in Ala-Valli Finland.  Their grandmother lived with them, we called her Mummo, grandmother in Finnish.  I learned a lot from Mummo and Mrs. Kiviniemi, even though I didn't speak much Finnish at that time.  They were very patient and taught me to knit (Even though the sweater I made looked like it was shaped for a monkey, not a person!).  They baked rye bread in a traditional stone bread oven where first you warm the oven with fire, then push the fire out and cook the bread in its place.  And they made this delicious porridge of barley.  I stayed 4 months with their family and had a wonderful time, they were an excellent host family and I will always have good memories of my time there.  I really enjoyed having a host sister my own age, she was so nice and welcoming to me.  Little did I know she would grow up to be the prime minister!

For those who think of porridge only as something from fairy tales, porridge is any dish made by boiling grains in milk or broth, for example oatmeal.  This Barley porridge is probably the most time consuming of all, but it is not difficult, I made it yesterday while trying to get all of the other Christmas activities done...I have to admit that I didn't pay very good attention to the recipes and it still turned out to be an incredible dish.

To make the barley porridge, I used a couple of different recipes.  The first is from Beatrice Ojakangas' Finnish Cookbook:


1/2 cup whole pearl barley
1 1/2 cups water
2 2/3 cups milk
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cook the barley and water slowly for 30 minutes or until the barley begins to expand.  Stir in the milk, bring to a boil, and pour into a casserole.  Dot with butter, add the salt, and bake in a slow oven (250 degrees Fahrenheit) for 4 hours or until the liquid is absorbed.  Stir occasionally as the casserole bakes.  Makes about 6 servings.

I compared this recipe to one I found in Finnish through this link:  Kotiliesi.  This recipe calls for soaking the barley overnight, boiling the grains for about an hour, and baking for three hours.  The ingredient amounts were much larger, this is so delicious, I decided to make a larger batch.  Kotiliesi lists ingredients as:
6 deciliters whole barley = 2 1/4 cups whole barley
6 deciliters water = 2 1/4 cups water
3 liters of whole milk
1-2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons of butter

Kotiliesi also includes hiding an almond in the porridge for the lucky person to find...I omitted this yesterday.  We will be putting a hidden almond in our rice porridge for Christmas Eve, though, this is a Finnish tradition.  The one who finds the almond gets good luck all year.

I soaked the barley for several hours, starting in the morning, we don't have a grandmother living with us to get up in the middle of the night to make this for breakfast, so I made it for dinner instead.  Then I decided to boil the barley for 1 hour as in the Finnish recipe, I remember the grains as being extremely soft, almost a hominy-like texture.  Murphy's law then took over, not only did I only have skim milk, I only had a couple of cups of it, and I had soaked an entire box of barley (2 1/4 cups)!  Not having time to run out to the grocery, I used the skim milk that I had, added some cream to it, and finished up the rest of the liquid with powdered milk and water.  Somewhere in all this, I lost track of the amount of liquid I actually used.  I sprayed a couple of large casserole dishes with cooking spray and put them in the oven at 250 degrees Fahrenheit, uncovered.  I stirred them about once an hour, and cooked them all afternoon.  After about 3 hours, the liquid had evaporated enough so I combined them into one casserole dish.  We were not ready to eat after 4 hours, so I left it in the oven.  We finally were ready to take a break and eat after 5 hours of baking.  It is a very creamy dish, and develops a slight crust on top when it is done.

I served the porridge with sugar, cinnamon sugar, and some strawberries out of the freezer.  It was incredible, everyone loved it, even the little boy who had been sneaking Christmas cookies all afternoon .  My husband, who in general does not care for porridge as an evening meal, ate two big bowls and said, "This is the best RICE pudding I've ever eaten."  ;D  I don't think too many Finnish families make this because it takes so long to make--Beatrice Ojakangas says that it is traditional in Satakunta which is in western Finland.  I am certainly glad that the Kiviniemi family served this to me, I will be making it again often, and next time I will pay more attention to the exact liquid amounts that I use!  I might try making this in a slow cooker, but then the liquid amounts would definitely have to be adjusted.

I would love to get comments on how others make this porridge!   I know that some of my readers disagree on political matters, please remember that this is a cooking blog, and I have only good things to say about both of my host families.

Happy Baking!