Mämmi, a traditional Finnish porridge or pudding

Mämmi is probably one of the most traditional foods eaten at Easter in Finland.  Traditionally it was baked in boxes made of birch bark, but today you can buy it in cardboard boxes in ever grocery store.  There are a lot of mämmi recipes, but the one I used is from The Finnish Cookbook by Beatrice Ojakangas.  Mämmi is a type of baked rye porridge, with a very strong molasses or malted flavor.  I have always loved molasses and enjoy this dish a lot.  

My husband has never really cared for the dish as purchased at the stores in Finland, but when I made it for him fresh, he really enjoyed it and asked if I could make it again.  There really is no substitute for homemade!  This dish had mixed results with the kids--I think part of their objection was the color.

The Finnish recipes generally include grated orange peel, or more specifically, grated bitter orange peel (pomeranssi).  After reading some side effects of bitter orange on Wikipedia, I decided not to include it.  I'm sure the small amount generally used in this dish is probably safe, but it sounds poisonous to me.  I left out the orange peel completely, and evidently that is what my husband didn't like about the purchased dish in Finnish grocery stores!  He commented that the flavor was very authentic except for the lack of a bitter aftertaste.  I took this as a compliment!

The ingredients I used were:

4 cups water (1 liter)

1/2 cup sorghum or dark molasses (1 dl plus 3.5 teaspoons)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup rye flour (2.5 dl)

Boil the water, molasses, and salt to a slow boil.  Use a whisk to stir in 1/4 of the rye flour.  Whisk vigorously and turn off the heat.  Let the mixture cool for at least 10 minutes, then whisk in the rest of the flour.

Stir in the remaining rye flour (and two tablespoons of bitter orange peel if you are using it, I didn't).  Remove from heat and pour into a 1.5 quart (1.5 liter) casserole dish.  I sprayed the dish with some cooking spray first, the recipe didn't say that it was necessary to grease the dish, but I think it would stick terribly if you didn't.

Bake at 275 F (135 C) for 3 hours.

  

Serve with whole milk or cream and a sprinkling of sugar.

Hope you enjoy this very traditional dish!

Apricot-Cardamom Cake

I collect cookbooks of all kinds, but especially the red-checkered Better Homes and Gardens ones.  There are a lot of them that look exactly alike on my shelf, but the ones from different years have very different recipes.  Cooking from the older ones is like a short culinary trip back in time!  This recipe is from Better Homes and Gardens New Baking Book, and is from 1998, not so long ago.

This recipe is not Finnish at all, as far as I know, but it contains cardamom and apricot which are popular flavors in Finland.  These flavors combine with brown sugar to make a moist and flavorful cake.  I doubled the recipe so that it would be easier to convert the amounts to metric, and a jelly roll pan is perfect to bake the larger cake.  Plus, it is Saturday and everyone is home, a single recipe wouldn't have lasted long!

Here are the ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour (5 dl)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 slightly beaten eggs
1 cup packed brown sugar (2.5 dl)
1 cup orange juice (2.5 dl)
1/2 cup applesauce (1.25 dl--not an exact conversion, but a little extra is ok in this recipe)
4 tablespoons butter, melted (57 grams)
1 cup finely snipped dried apricots (2.5 dl)

Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C).

First, combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, and cardamom) in a separate bowl and mix well.  It is always important to mix the baking soda and/or powder in the flour first because otherwise the batter won't rise evenly.

Next, mix the egg, brown sugar, orange juice, applesauce, and melted butter together in a separate bowl. Make sure you pack in the brown sugar to measure it to get the right amount.

Here are the snipped apricots, I used clean Kitchen scissors to cut them up.

I stirred together the dry ingredients, the wet ingredients, and the apricots, scraping the sides well with a spatula.

I baked the cake in a jelly roll pan which was lined with parchment.  The original instructions said to use an ungreased pan, but I was afraid it might stick.  Better Homes and Gardens also suggested that you could line the pan with foil, but the parchment worked really well.

Bake the cake in preheated a 350 F (175 C) oven for about 20 minutes.  The cake baked really quickly in this size pan.  Cool without removing from the pan, or it will fall apart.

For the icing, mix about a cup (2.5 dl) of powdered sugar with enough orange juice so that it drizzles easily (about 2 or 3 tablespoons).  Drizzle this over the cake.

When the cake is cool, cut it into bars.  Or if your family is impatient like mine, just cut it and eat it warm and crumbly!  This cake got rave reviews from everyone, even the family members who prefer not to find fruit in their cakes.

Finnish hamburger pies--lihapiirakka

These little pastries filled with meat, onions and rice are incredible.  They are not quite like the pasties served in Michigan's upper peninsula where a lot of Finns settled (those actually are an American Finnish dish, I am planning a post on those very soon), but if you like those, you should give these a try.  These are served all over Finland in cafes or outdoor fast food eateries called kiosks.

Beatrice Ojakangas calls these "Hot Meat Tarts" or "Kuumat Piiraset"  in The Finnish Cookbook.

I'll start with the yeast pastry dough recipe:

1 package active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)

1 1/4 cup lukewarm milk (3 dl)

1 teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

1/2 cup sugar (1 dl plus 1.25 tablespoons)

4+ cups of white flour (10+ dl)

1/2 cup melted butter (113.4 grams)

First, I dissolved the yeast in the warm milk.  I microwaved the milk for about a minute and a half, then stirred it well to get the right temperature.  Microwave times vary a lot, so be careful, if the milk is too hot, it will kill the yeast and the dough won't rise.  Then I added the salt, egg and sugar and stirred it well.

I used my stand mixer with a dough hook to beat in the flour, one cup at a time for the first three cups.  This is what it looked like after three cups of flour were added (I also used a spatula to scrape the sides of the bowl):

Then I added more flour 1/2 cup at a time, here it is after 4 cups:

The dough should be very stiff, 4 1/2 cups of flour seemed to be the right amount this time, but this will vary depending on weather conditions, etc.  Here is what it looked like:

I sprinkled flour over the dough in order to be able to pull it out without getting my hands sticky.  Then I shaped it into a ball and put it in a lightly oiled non-metallic bowl to rise.  Never leave dough in a metal bowl to rise--it just doesn't work as well because the metal conducts heat too well.  I covered the dough and put it in a warm place for about an hour.

After an hour, it had doubled in size.  I punched it down and let it rise for another half an hour while I prepared the filling.

The meat filling ingredients are:

2 pounds ground lean beef (about a kilo)
1 cup finely chopped onion (5 dl) (I used dehydrated onion to make that amount)
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsley (1.25 dl)  (I used 8 teaspoons of dried parsley)
1 cup cooked rice

First, I put some rice in my rice cooker to cook.  Leftover rice would be great in this recipe.  I used Jasmine rice because that is what I had in the pantry, but plain rice would work as well.

Then I cooked the hamburger, stirring well so that it was in very small pieces.  You don't want to brown the meat, just cook it until it is no longer pink.  If you are using fresh onion, cook it along with the meat.  Since I used dehydrated, I added it at the end.  Dehydrated onion burns easily.  I salted and peppered the meat, then added the parsley.  By now the rice was finished, so stirred it in.

I rolled out half of the dough, it was really easy to roll compared to pie crust dough.  I cut rounds with a 3 inch cookie cutter, like any yeast dough, the circles shrink once they are cut.  Before filling them, brush a little water around the outside edge so they will seal well.  I used quite a bit of filling in each one, the dough is stretchy and easy to work with.

From the other dough, I cut squares as suggested in Beatrice Ojakangas' book.  I didn't like the way these looked after they were stuffed.  I think next time I will make larger circles by cutting with a knife around a coffee can lid.  My family all seemed to like the large ones better, and they were less work.

I've also seen some home cooks in Finland make this like a casserole with a layer of dough on the top and bottom of the filling.  I like the fact that each is an individual serving, though.

I let them sit for about an hour until everyone came home from school and work.  Beatrice recommends ten minutes to let them rise again, but it didn't seem to matter that I let them sit longer.

Preheat the oven to 400F (200C).  Brush the pastries with beaten egg before baking them.  Bake for 20 minutes.

These were delicious, we ate them with homemade pickles, tomatoes and mustard from Ikea.  They also went well with avocado slices, but that was not a very Finnish way to eat them!

The slightly sweet crust was perfect with the savory filling.  These would be great to pack in a lunch or to freeze and thaw individually for lunches.

Finnish buttermilk crepes/pancakes (lätty,lettu, lätyt in Finnish--plätt in Swedish--plett in Norwegian...)

These little crepes are very traditional little pancakes in Finland and the rest of Scandinavia.  I made these as a special treat yesterday when the kids came home from school.  I love my "new" antique cast iron pancake pan that I found over spring break, and I'm really enjoying cooking with it.  And everyone else is enjoying eating what I cook...

Sorry about the long title for this post--there is some confusion as to what these are called.  Some might even call them pannukakku in Finnish (pancake), but I agree with those that reserve the word panukakku for Finnish oven pancakes, like in this post.  By the way, you could substitute these crepes to eat on Thursday with the pea soup if you want!  ;D

I used the recipe from The Finnish Cookbook by Beatrice Ojakangas, her ingredient list is:

2 eggs
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk (2.5 dl)
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup white flour (2.5 dl)
butter for frying

I doubled all the ingredients (and still didn't have quite enough once the teenagers started eating...)

Beat the eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl, then add the salt, buttermilk, melted butter and flour.

Beat this until smooth with a whisk.  Then the original recipe says to let it rest for at least an hour.  I let it rest about 15 minutes to let the bubbles settle and make sure all the flour was moistened.  The kids don't come home at the same time, and I fried them fresh for each one, so some batter sat for more than the suggested hour.  We really couldn't tell the difference between the first and the last ones.  I think 15 minutes is plenty of resting time, but this keeps well if you need to wait to cook them.  It should keep fine even overnight if covered and refrigerated.

To fry the crepes, I used this pan with indentations.  If you don't have a pan like this, you could make them in a small nonstick frying pan or other small skillet.

I started by putting butter in each indentation and letting it melt as the pan heated up.  Be careful, butter burns really easily!  As soon as the butter started to melt, I filled each indentation with batter.  When the cast iron pan got really hot and they started to steam, I immediately turned it off.  (If you are using a lighter-weight skillet, just turn it down to low, but a thick pan like this stays hot for a long time).

Crepes don't have any baking powder or baking soda in them, so they don't have little bubbles when it is time to flip them (like American pancakes would).  Instead, they kind of poof up in the middle from the trapped steam, and you can see in this photo that they are starting to get firm around the edges, these are ready to turn over:

The goal with these is to not let them get too brown.  These can be a bit more brown than traditional crepes, but be careful not to burn them.  I used this small old brownie server to turn them in the small indentations (it belonged to my grandmother), it worked perfectly.

We ate these with blueberry soup, you can find the recipe here.  Or you could serve them with jam and/or whipped cream.

They were so delicious, I need to go shopping now for more buttermilk before the kids get home!

Blueberry soup--blåbärssoppa--mustikkakeitto

This is a really easy and delicious way to eat berries, and a rather low-calorie and nutritious dessert, too.  In Finland, you can buy blueberry soup in any grocery store next to the milk products.  Other popular fruit soup flavors include raspberry, mixed forest berries, and strawberry.  Gooseberries or rhubarb are also really good in this soup.  The basic process is the same for any kind of fruit that you want to substitute with.

I used some really large blueberries that grow on the high bush plants in the Ozarks because I had these in my freezer.  In Finland, the berries would probably be the smaller, wild variety.  Both taste good in this recipe, it is hard to mess up this fruit soup!

Boil these ingredients for 10 minutes over medium heat:

2 cups water (5 dl)
2 cups blueberries (or substitute other berries if you want!) (5dl)
3 tablespoons sugar

I used a medium-sized saucepan and added the blueberries right away because they were frozen, but didn't start counting the time until they came to a boil.  If you use fresh berries, it is probably better to let the water boil first, then stir in the other ingredients.

To thicken the soup, stir together in a small bowl:

3 tablespoons cornstarch or potato starch
3 tablespoons cold water

I used potato starch this time.  After you mix the thickener very well, take a tablespoon-full of the hot soup and mix it into the cold thickener.  This tempers the mixture and makes it less likely to clump.

Now pour the tempered thickener into the hot soup, stirring constantly until the soup thickens.  This is the same process used to thicken broth for lump-free gravies.

If you find that the soup is a little too thick, you can always stir in a little more water.  Fruit soups continue to thicken as they cool.

We love to eat fruit soup with a little whipped cream, but yesterday I made this as a special after-school treat with small Finnish pancakes that are a lot like mini crepes.  That recipe will be my next post.

Other ideas for Blini dough--overnight waffles and sweet pancake toppings

We had an extra batch of blini dough from this recipe, so we decided to put jam on some of them, along with a small dollop of sour cream.  They were delicious as a small, sweet pancake.

I decided that the blinni batter was a lot like a recipe that I have for overnight waffles, so I put the extra dough in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for the night.  Note that you can only do this with a yeast batter.  If the batter contained baking powder it would be flat the next day.

The next morning it was nice and bubbly, and the kids were delighted to have fresh waffles for breakfast on a school day!  Here is what the batter looked like after a night in the refrigerator:

I preheated the waffle iron and spread batter thinly and evenly in it before closing the lid.  It was so easy.  I think next time we make blinis, I might make extra batter again just for breakfast!

Blinis with sour cream, caviar and smoked salmon--blinit

We are back from a very nice spring break, I haven't cooked a thing in over a week!  Actually, cooking and baking are never a chore for me, I find it really relaxing, almost meditative.  I've been wanting to make these blinis for several weeks now, they are often eaten on Fat Tuesday in Finland (also called Shrove Tuesday), according to The Finnish Cookbook by Beatrice Ojakangas.  There is another kind of small pancake more commonly eaten in Western Finland, but I'll be making those later.  Blinnis are originally a Russian dish.  (The internet seems divided on whether to spell it blini or blinni, so excuse me while I alternate the spelling in this post, just to keep the search engines happy!)

The reason I am now able to make these pancakes is that I found a wonderful antique cast iron griddle at Aid's Antique Mall over spring break.  It has the indentations to make Scandinavian pancakes, I brought a non-stick pan back from Finland a couple of years ago, but it is so light-weight that I never use it.  This cast iron pan is worth the extra expense, it is very heavy and cooks beautifully.

Here is the ingredient list that I used, I made a few changes to the one in the recipe book:

one package dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)

2 cups lukewarm milk (4 3/4 dl)

3 cups sifted flour (7 dl)

2 tablespoons sugar

3 eggs, separated

6 tablespoons melted butter

1/2 teaspoon salt

Blinnis are made with a yeast dough, so the first thing I did was warm two cups of milk in the microwave.  Make sure and stir the milk before putting the yeast in it, and don't let it get more than lukewarm or it will kill the yeast and the dough won't rise.  If you don't warm the milk, the dough will take a really long time to rise.  In my microwave it took two minutes, but microwaves vary a lot.

Stir the yeast and sugar into the warm milk.

Sift the flour before measuring it, otherwise the amounts will be wrong.  My sifter broke a long time ago, but I use a mesh strainer over a bowl and just shake it a bit, it works great!

Add one cup (2 1/3 dl) of the flour to the warm milk and mix it well.  The flour didn't dissolve well when I stirred it with a spoon, so I used a whisk.  At this point, cover the batter and put it in a warm spot to rise for about half an hour or until it doubles in volume.

After the batter rises, separate the eggs, yolks from whites.  Break up the yolks with a fork or whisk, and stir them into the batter.  

Add the rest of the flour (2 cups or 4.75 dl) and stir well.  Once again, I used the whisk to eliminate any lumps.  Add the salt and melted butter, mixing well.

Beat the egg whites until they are stiff.

Fold the egg whites gently into the batter, using a spatula to scrape down the sides.  Do not over mix at this point.  

Cover the dough again and let it rise in a warm place for another half hour.

After the dough has risen to about double, it is time to cook the blinis.  I put a little butter in each indentation before putting in about 2 tablespoons of batter.  If you don't have a pan like this, you could make them free form on any griddle but they may not be as perfectly round.  You could place a greased round cookie cutter on the griddle to shape the dough.  

The dough bubbled up nicely when it was time to flip the blinis.  I found that the new pan was so heavy and conducted heat so well that I could turn the heat off to cook the pancakes once it heated up.  I really miss having a gas stove where I could regulate the heat better!

We really enjoyed eating these savory little pancakes!  We put a dollop of sour cream and some lumpfish roe (from Ikea) on them.  The kids liked putting cold smoked salmon on theirs, and we added a few capers.  I doubt capers are very traditional, but the salty taste was really good.  

I made an extra batch of the dough because I was afraid we wouldn't have enough for my hungry teenagers, but one batch was almost enough.  If you want to see what I did with the extra batter, check out the post here.