Jaloviina, noble booze

    Jaloviina matches nicely with autumn colors

When people talk about Finland and alcohol, Koskenkorva vodka pops up sooner or later. But if I had to nominate our national booze, it would definitely be Jaloviina, noble booze. Koskenkorva is so straight forward and boring, Jaloviina has much more character and nuances. Jaloviina manages to be rough and elegant at the same time - and therefore it suits every possible occasion.

Jaloviina is a mixture of brandy and vodka, some call it "cut cognac" - the vodka cuts off the bitterness of cognac. Nowadays there are two editions available at Alko: one-star (Jaloviina*) and three-stars (Jaloviina***). Jaloviina* contains 1/4 of brandy, and Jaloviina*** contains about 3/4 of brandy - or at least that was the case originally, nowadays the portions are classified as confidential. Last spring Alko sold a special edition of two-stars (Jaloviina**), which had 50-50 brandy and vodka. How many stars are idea, that's a matter of taste and epic debate

As I wrote earlier, Jaloviina suits for any occasion. It also goes nicely in simple drinks: Jallu-cola (Jaloviina and Coke) is a classic. However, my personal favorite is Jallu-Pommac - a drink made of Jaloviina and flavored soda called Pommac; a perfect summer drink that was originally developed for Helsinki Olympic games in 1952. Jaloviina also strengthens nicely otherwise so boring desserts: pour some Jaloviina into chocolate mousse to reduce the sweetness, or moisturize a dry cake with suitable amount (from couple of table spoons to couple of deciliters) of Jallu. One of the best fish soups I've ever tasted was made of salmon, potatoes, onion, morel, cream and Jaloviina*.

Lettu, pancake, crepe

Lettu, lätty, räiskäle, ohukainen - Finnish pancakes have many names. In terms of pancakes Finland is closer to France than US: Finnish lettu is thin, just like French crepes, and definitely not as fluffy and spongey as American pancakes. In Finland lettu and pancake, pannukakku, are two different things: lettu is fried on a frying pan, while pancake is baked in the oven. The best lettu is made on open fire using a cast iron pan.

Here's a very basic lettu recipe (it's difficult to say the exact amounts, since I never measure the lettu ingredients):

5 dl milk
2 eggs
2 to 3 dl flour
0,5 tea spoon salt
2 table spoon melted butter
Some more butter for frying

Melt some butter on frying pan. Pour some dough on the pan. Let it fry. Turn around (with a spatula or by casting the lettu in the air). Let it fry. Take it a aside. Next one. Enjoy with strawberry jam and whipped cream.

And now let's get to the point - the reason why lettu is such a brilliant dish: you can make tens or hundreds of variations without actually loosing the essence. I've listed some of the variations here, but I'm sure everyone has their own:

• If you have issues with milk, you can replace the milk with soda water (vichy) and butter with oil.
• Replace part of the wheat flours with barley or buckwheat to get more rustic feeling.

• Mix some nettles or spinach into the dough and have smoked fish and cheese on top - that's a proper lettu-lunch.
• Mix some blood into the dough and you'll get blood pancakes, verilettu. Sounds horror but it makes a proper meal. Serve with lingonberry jam.
• Back to less hard core mixes: blueberries and/or banana in the dough give a nice touch too.
• Pancake dough made of buckwheat and yeast turns into blini. Serve with sour cream, onion, mushrooms, roe and salted fish. Heavenly.
• Mix the leftover porridge into pancake dough, put it into oven and you'll have Åland style pancake. That'll keep the hunger away for some time.

But one thing I'm a bit surprised about: Finnish restaurants serve lettu very seldom as dessert. I can't understand why. Well, Sodexho and other lunch restaurants serve pancake, pannukakku almost every Thursday as dessert, and sometimes some bad industrial lettu. But I mean that you can't see lettu very often on the menus of real restaurants. I think the only restaurant where I've had lettu as dessert is restaurant Savu - and their lettu plate is really good!

The dessert of my childhood

Maitokiisseli, milk kissel, or more describingly, milk pudding was one of the top desserts of my childhood. Maybe because it's very simple and affordable - all you need is milk, potato starch and sugar. I guess this is poor nations' version of creme brulee, crema catalana, pannacotta or whichever white vanilla stuff. I had almost full jar of milk with threatening due date, so I decided to upgrade the recipe a bit:

8,5 dl milk
1,5 dl cream
1 pod of vanilla, cut into half
6 tbs cornstarch
4 tbs sugar
A hint of salt

Mix all the ingredients in a non-sticky kettle. Cook the mixture until it's boiling - you need to mix it all the time. After 2 minutes of boiling, take off the kettle and remove the vanilla pod. Put the kettle into sink with cold water and let it cool down. Mix every now and then. This way you can prevent the "skin formation" on top of the pudding. Dose the pudding into small bowls or cups - there's enough stuff for six if you want bigger portions, or for eight if you prefer normal size. Let it rest in the fridge over night. Serve cold with berries.

The pudding was ok. Maybe a bit lame with strawberries, though. With huge amount of blueberries or some raspberries this would have been perfect, but the flavor of the strawberries was simply not rich enough. Maybe a hint of orange peel would have done it. Have to try that next time.

Karelian rice pies

May I introduce a laborious, challenging and delicious classic: Karelian rice pies - traditional food that everybody likes.

This is how to make them:

First you need to cook the porridge. This may sound easy, but to me it's the hardest part. Cooking milk is just not my cup of tea.

For the porridge you need

3 dl porridge rice

3 dl water

1,5 l milk

1,5 tsp salt

The milk should be fatty milk, not skimmed. And the rice should be porridge rice, not basmati or jasmin rice.



Cook the water and rice for couple of minutes, the rice should suck all the water.

Add milk and salt. Cook for about 40 minutes. All the cook books say that you need to mix the boiling porridge every now and then, but I've noticed that no matter how much I mix, always at some point those brown burnt flakes start flowing in the porridge.





This is something the cook books don't teach you: just pick the largest burnt sucker flakes up from the kettle and don't tell anyone.



Once the porridge is done, let it cool. Or the next phase is so slow that the porridge probably cools down nicely on its own.

For the shell dough you need

4 dl rye flour
1 dl wheat flour
2 dl water
1 tsp salt

Mix the ingredients.



Roll a bar out of the dough. Cut the bar into 30 pieces.



Roll each of the dough piece into ball.





Roll the dough ball into flat, thin, round or oval flake having about 1 mm thickness. Use wheat flours if needed.



Pile up the dough shells on top of each other, about 10 for each pile.



Once all the shells are rolled, you can start filling the pies. Spread a nice junk of porridge on top of the shell.



Wrap the sides to the center of the pie.



Start pinching the dough into wrinkles.



First the other end, then flip it around...



...and continue with the rest of the pie, from center to the tip of the pie.

Put the pie on baking plate. You can lay the pies quite close to each other, they won't expand in the oven.

250 degrees celsius for 15 to 20 minutes, and they're done. But not ready yet.



Melt some butter and water.



Brush the pies with butter-water.



Let the pies cool slowly under a cloth (you might want to have a piece of paper between the pies and the cloth, you just brushed them with butter, remember).

Enjoy!

Sweet rhubarb soup

Apologies. It's likely that from now on there's going to be more talk about food. That's because the lovely summer season with fresh vegetables, berries and all the goodies is about to begin!




Yesterday I got the summer's first bunch of rhubarbs from my mother in law. I decided to make sweet rhubarb soup, kiisseli (I have no idea what's kiisseli in English, I've seen the following options in various lunch menus: kissel, pudding, fool, soup). Kiisseli is an ordinary every-day dessert in Finland, and it's often served at lunch places.

I went for Hans Välimäki's recipe. However, I took the liberty to modify the two-michelin-stars-chef's recipe - because he didn't explain all the kiisseli-tricks that my mother has taught me. And after all, it was Mothers' Day.



According Hans I would have needed 1 liter of chopper rhubarb. However, I barely had 4 dls, so I added some raspberries and lingonberries to compensate.



I cooked them in 7 dls of water and 1 dl of sugar. Hans's recipe said 2 dl of sugar, but I'm not used to that sweet. Cooked them for about 10 minutes. I also added a hint of salt into the pot. Hans didn't advise me to do that, I've learnt it from a mother (not my own, but my friend's mom). Salt enriches the flavors and prevents the flat taste of water.



I mixed 4 tbl spoons (Hans said 5 tbl spoons, but it sounded like too much) of potato flour with 3 tbl spoons of cold water, and poured the white stuff into the hot stuff while mixing.



Then I poured the soup into bowl, and sprinkled some sugar on top of the soup. Again, Hans didn't say anything about the sugar, but my mom has told me it prevents the formation of "skin" on top of the soup.



I let it cool down and served with whipped cream. Hans suggested vanilla ice or milk, but my mom served cream with the dessert soups.

With all due respect, Hans, you may be the champion of fine dining, but when we're talking about everyday food, nobody can beat the moms. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

It's nettle time!

The summer food season starts with nettles. Those itchy, burning weeds that grow everywhere they shouldn't. But they also turn into great food and contain lot of vitamins, iron and whatever good stuff.




If you want to pick nettle leaves for food, the time is now - you only have couple of weeks. Picking nettles is every man's right in Finland, as long as you don't go to anybody's backyard. I recommend not to pick them right next to a road (because of dust from the cars) or pedestrian paths (because of peeing dogs), but close to a jogging route will do just fine. Take scissors and gloves with you. I've picked only the leaves and left the rod and the roots into forest.

Once you come back home with the catch, you need to wash and cook the leaves: 5 minutes in loose, boiling water will do it. Pour away the water, let the nettles cool and grind them in a food processor. Then what to do with mashed nettles? Well, whatever you'd do with spinach: soup, pancakes, omelet, or even pesto.




For pancakes you need about 1 dl of nettle pure, 5 dl of milk, couple of eggs, a little bit of salt, some couple of dls flour and butter for the pan. Serve with smoked fish, salad, Manchego cheese and sour creme.




If you think weeds are waste and not good enough for you, I want to remind you that crown princess Victoria of Sweden had nettles in her wedding menu. If it's good enough for Vickan, it's good enough for you too.

Our squeaky cheese

This is something that Finnish restaurants serve as dessert. Not all Finnish restaurants but those which brand themselves as Finnish restaurants and where the waitresses are forced to wear folk costumes.




You need leipäjuusto, Finnish squeaky cheese. About 200 grams for three persons. Cut it into pieces and set nicely on an oven-proof bowl.




Crumble some brown sugar, fariinisokeri, and cinnamon on top of cheese and to the bottom of the bowl. Add some cream, kuohukerma. Put it into 200 C oven for 5 to 10 minutes.




Serve with cloudberries.

Eastern for Easter

Another traditional Easter desserts is pasha, sweet and creamy quark delicacy with lemon and raisins. Pasha as such is bit heavy to my taste, and therefore I prefer the pulla version of pasha. This is more or less traditional pastry from the Eastern Finland, Karelia.

First you need to make a pulla dough:

6 to 8 dl wheat flour
1 bag of dry yeast
2 tsp crushed cardamom
1 dl sugar
0,5 tsp salt
3 dl milk
1 egg
100 g butter

Mix 2 dl of flour with the dry ingredients. Add milk (40 C), egg and melted butter, and mix. Add the rest of the flour and mix. Knead for couple of minutes.




Let the dough rest under a cloth for at least 30 minutes, until it has expanded to double of its original size.




Mix the pasha filling while waiting for the dough to rise:

600 g quark

200 g sour cream

2 eggs

1 - 1,5 dl sugar

vanilla

peel of 1 lemon, grated

1,5 dl raisins




Spread the dough on the baking plate and pour the filling on top of it.




Keep it in 200 C oven for about 25 to 35 minutes.




Let it cool down properly before eating. That's the hardest part.

Rahka

Rahka, quark is sourish dairy product that seems to be common in the Northern and Eastern Europe, at least in the Nordic countries, Germany and and former Soviet countries. Rahka is different to cottage cheese. You can use rahka in baking or as it is for the desserts. The easiest way to prepare rahka is simply to mix it with whipped cream, berries and sugar.

For preparing a big bowl of rahka you need

4 small jars of rahka (200 g each)

2 dl of cream, whipped

700 g berries, defrosted

sugar to taste

vanilla

Mix. Enjoy.