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Breakfast for me is usually either a very simple, hurried thing or something best described as “I hope it’s still early enough in the afternoon that we can call it brunch” with not much in between. Since I felt a box of vending machine shrimp would miss the point, but also that if I gave in and made brunch there would be no discernible difference between breakfast and afternoon tea without including a conspicuous clock in the photos, I settled on a breakfast spread. Typical Finnish breakfast foods, any of which one might quickly assemble from previously-prepared components on a weekday morning, but with the kind of quantity and variety usually reserved for entertaining guests or for holidays that lack their own seasonal breakfasts. Picking the actual menu was a very simple exercise: Cured salmon on rye bread – the bog standard Rice pastries with cultured eggbutter – the audience favorite Whipped lingonberry porridge – the personal favorite  Since every dish on the menu requires significant resting time either for curing, fermentation, or just plain chilling a first person recounting of the cooking process would be chronologically jumbled at best, so I’ll stick to more concise recipes with brief explanations for each course. Cured salmon on rye bread Rye bread in various forms is ubiquitous, whether as a breakfast sandwich, a snack, or as a side to a larger meal. Finnish rye bread is usually relatively dense and noticeably quite sour, 100% rye sourdough, so that’s what I’m going with. I also decided to make small portion size rolls rather than big loaves due to a combination of personal preference and oven logistics. Cured salmon is not the only thing that goes on rye bread but it’s a common one, generally delicious, and more feasible with both my skill and the challenge’s schedule than making ham or aged cheeses. I went with two different flavors: a very traditional mound of dill, and a less traditionally but reasonably common now pepper-lemon-ginger mix. Component 1: rye bread Ingredients: Sourdough starter Around 1.5l rye flour 1-2 tsp salt A pinch of sugar Revive the starter from storage in the fridge: 1 part starter 4 parts water 2 parts rye flour Leave at room temperature for a day or two, depending on how long it has been since it was last fed. Once it bubbles enough that the noise alarms the dog, feed it again and let ferment overnight so that the yeast is fresh and vigorous when the bread is made. Combine 3dl slightly-above-body-temperature (37-42°C) water and the salt and sugar with three quarters of the starter (roughly 4dl, store the rest in the fridge or freezer to maintain your pet yeast colony for future use). Once the salt and sugar have dissolved start slowly stirring in flour. I realize volumetric measurements are baking heresy, but the weight of flour needed varies depending on how you handled the starter, so it’s easier to work at small increments towards a target texture. Keep adding flour little by little to make a smooth, relatively solid dough (think dumpling wrapper dough, not wheat bread dough), usually that takes about a litre of rye flour. Once you’ve reached a satisfactory texture, keep kneading the dough for at least 15 minutes or so, and then cover with a kitchen towel and leave in a warm place to proof for 5-7 hours depending on the temperature. When the dough has doubled in size, shape it into breads on a well-floured surface.  Roll the dough into ~1cm thickness and use a small Tupperware lid / large cookie cutter / suitably thin bowl / whatever you please to press off consistently sized disks. Arrange the disks on a baking sheet, cover with a cloth, and let proof again for another 2-3 hours until the dough bounces back quite quickly when pressed. Heat up the oven to 220°C, and bake the breads for 7-8 minutes, until the crust is very solid and the breads have risen noticeably thicker. Remove the breads from the oven, let cool for a little while, and slice one open horizontally to check the texture inside. The outside should be harder than most breads but not so much that it cracks rather than tearing, while the inside should be soft and crumby.  Component 2: cured salmon Ingredients: 2 pieces of salmon A volume of coarse salt equal to the total volume of your fish A quarter to a half of the salt’s weight in sugar Flavoring mix 1: 1 handful fresh dill, finely chopped 1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper Flavoring mix 2: 1 tbsp ground sesame seeds 1 tbsp grated lemon peel 2 tbsp grated ginger 2 tbsp hot pepper flakes Remove skin and bones form the salmon pieces, pat dry, and rub on your herbs and aromatics. Mix together the salt and sugar and cover the bottoms of two bowls with a thick layer of the salt mix. Press the fish into the salt, pile any remaining herbs or aromatics on top of the fish, and use the rest of the salt to cover the fish, trying to cover the sides to what extent is manageable. Cover the bowls and stack them so that some weight is being applied to both pieces of fish.  Leave to cure in the fridge for two days (or less, or more, depending on how strongly cured you want it) and wipe off the salt and aromatics and pat dry brine. The fish should be noticeably firmer, salty, and flavored strongly but without overwhelming the fish. Slice into 2mm slices before serving.  Prepare some vegetables and a blob of cultured butter, and you’ve got a decent sandwich spread going. Rice pastries with eggbutter Rice pastries (commonly called Karelian pastries, but one is a more descriptive translation than the other) are another very common breakfast or snack item, though most people just buy them frozen (admittedly they suffer less from this than many pastries do) or from a store/bakery. The most old-school variants would be filled with barley porridge or mashed root vegetables, but the public opinion swung quite strongly towards rice basically as soon as imported grains became affordable. This is a very good thing, because rice is better than turnips and barley porridge tastes like coagulated misery. Boiled egg smashed together with a bit of butter to bind it into a spreadable goop and often chives or parsley is by far the most common topping, but for example cheese, ham, or salted fish are also normal and work well. I opted for leaving out the optional herbs from the eggbutter and instead making some cultured butter for a tangier, more complex flavor. Component 1: rice pastries Ingredients: Filling: 2.5dl water 7.5dl milk 2dl starchy, short-grain white rice 0.5 tsp salt 1 egg Crust: 1.5dl cold water 1tsp salt 3dl rye flour 1dl wheat flour 2 tbsp melted butter Boil rice for 10 minutes in water, then add milk and the salt and turn the heat down to low. Let cook on very low heat for another 30-45 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes or less to prevent burning. Once the rise has a thick porridge texture, turn the heat off and let the porridge sit under a lid to cool down. Once the rice has cooled enough to touch, stir in the egg.  For the crust, stir the salt and the flours into the cold water and knead until smooth and quite firm. Roll the dough into a log and divide it into equally-sized pieces (12 pieces makes pastries on the larger end as in the photos). Cover the pieces with a damp towel to prevent them from drying out. One by one on a floured surface, roll the pieces into thin (like, 1mm) oblong or round disks. Dust the disks with flour to stack them and store covered until all the dough pieces are finished.  Heat the oven to 300°C (or in general, as high as you can reasonably get a domestic oven). The idea is that the crust and the surface of the filling cook very quickly, while leaving most of the filling soft and juicy. Meanwhile, take the wrappers and spoon a 1cm thick layer of the rice porridge in the middle of each one, leaving a bit of space on all side. Fold up the edges on two opposite sides, and gently pinch your way around the pastry to flute the edges. Avoid pinching too hard, because as you see in the photos sharper points burn very quickly.  Bake the pastries until the top of the filling turns golden brown (7-12 minutes, depending on how hot your oven gets), then remove the pastries from the oven and brush the crusts with a bit of melted butter.  Component 2: cultured eggbutter Ingredients (makes a decently sized log of butter, of which we use about a tenth): 1l cream 2dl plain yogurt 4 eggs Salt and black pepper to taste Thoroughly mix the yogurt into the cream. Cover to protect from dust and leave at room temperature for a day or two. The cream mixture should thicken a little and pick up a noticeable sour taste. Once this has happened, transfer the mixture to a larger bowl if needed and whip with a mixer until you have some overly stiff whipped cream that’s starting to break. At this point make sure you mix along the bottom of a bowl and have no unexpected pocket of liquid cream that would cause a mess later, then continue mixing for a few more minutes until the cream separates into yellow solids and a white buttermilk.  Line a fine mesh sieve with cheesecloth (or take an old top your SO doesn’t like, wash it super well, and use that) and pile the butter curds into it. Let the buttermilk drain through, then twist the cheesecloth into a tight bundle to squeeze out more of the liquid. Unwrap the butter and knead the lump between your hands in either a bowl of ice water or under very cold running water (or in a white-bottomed plate to get a photo of the color of something white and translucent…) until you’ve gotten out as much of the buttermilk as you can. Once done, pat dry the lump of butter, wrap in baking parchment, and roll around to shape into a log.  For eggbutter, boil the eggs for 7-8 minutes. Peel the eggs and put them in a big bowl with about 30g of the butter (softened). Add salt and pepper to taste and mash it all up with a fork to your preferred chunkiness level.  Whipped lingonberry porridge: Ok, I started by saying I’d make breakfast foods, not just sweets people sometimes eat for breakfast. That was a lie, sort of almost kinda maybe, since whipped berry porridge is definitely often served as dessert (or as a sweet snack) as well. The thing is, berries are different. If you make this with sweet berries like blueberries, blackcurrants, or even good raspberries, no matter how restrained you are on the sugar the sweetness will still be clearly in the desserts range. On the other hand, if you make it with something like lingonberries and let the juice reduce a little to become more concentrated, you can add a fair amount of sugar and still have a porridge that is almost painfully tart and not perceptibly sweet at all. We’re talking sour enough that simply crushing some of the berries in a jar is enough to safely preserve the rest due to the acidity. The very sour version is usually eaten with a bit of milk or cream and some sweeter berries (or a sprinkling of extra sugar if you don’t have berries at hand, but you just made a food where the primary ingredient is berries so ???) to balance the tartness. This is the variation I generally prefer (even as a dessert), so it’s what I ended up going with. Very lightly sweetened, extremely sour, with fresh berries and a dollop of whipped cream on top for balance. Component 1: lingonberry porridge Ingredients: 1l water 1kg lingonberries (roughly 1 litre, maybe a little less) 40g sugar 110g wheat semolina A pinch of salt Mix the water, lingonberries, salt and sugar in a pot and boil for 5-10 minutes until the berries break. The liquid will become a bright red. Strain through a fine mesh sieve into another pot to remove the lingonberry skins (this step isn’t necessary with softer berries like raspberries) and return to heat. Measure out the semolina, and very slowly add it to the pot while stirring constantly. Semolina forms clumps very easily when introduced to liquids, so you want to have some patience (and great stirring vigor) here. Once you’re confident the porridge is smooth and lump-free, let it cook on low heat for about 5 minutes, until it reaches the consistency of a thin porridge. It will thicken considerably as it cools, so you want to stop a bit before what you’d consider the normal texture for porridge.  Chill thoroughly (multiple hours in the fridge, or like I did leave it on the balcony overnight tightly covered) and whip with a hand mixer until smooth with a mousse-like texture.  Component 2: Whipped cream Ingredients: 1dl cream 2tsp amaretto Combine ingredients in a bowl. Whip. Component 3: Sweet berry salad Ingredients: 1dl Blueberries 1dl Blackcurrants 1dl Raspberries 0.5dl Redcurrants Combine ingredients in a bowl. Mix. You thought whipped cream was going to be the simplest set of instructions this ICSA round? The actual meal: Put out each dish with their condiments all together. Once eating, assemble a sandwich or two with different fillings, slather some eggbutter on the rice filling, glop some cream onto the porridge and pile on some berries. Most of the thing son the table are made in advance by their nature anyway, so leftovers will keep fine and you can eat without worrying about the fact that you made a ridiculous amount of some things.  ,  , What worked, what didn’t: The breads came out as intended, though I think I’ll try a higher ratio of starter the next time, as well as a hotter oven for a shorter time. They taste and feel like regular, plain Finnish rye bread which is fine and all, but I think the taste could be sourer and the textural difference between the inside and the crust could probably be improved by meddling with the cooking conditions. For the fish my only regret is that there wasn’t more of it, both flavors turned out excellent. The rice pastries turned out great, judging by how quickly they disappeared and that I was promptly advised to make them more often. Cultured butter was technically a success in that it turned into butter with a bit of tangy complexity normal butter doesn’t have. That said, I’ll definitely try to extend the fermentation time and/or find a livelier bit of dairy to inoculate the cream with for the next time in the hopes of getting what is now a noticeable but subtle note to come out stronger. The porridge turned out basically perfect and I will cling on to the memory of that smooth texture and sour and sweet flavors the next time someone gives me a bowl that was over-sweetened or cooked too thick and turned grainy instead of smooth when whipped. Waci fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Oct 13, 2019 |
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Oct 13, 2019 04:30
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| # ? May 4, 2024 09:00 |
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Very nice!
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Oct 13, 2019 05:05
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Love that rye bread! I visited Finland for the first time recently and I was at a hotel with a rather extensive breakfast spread, but they didn't have anything like those rice pastries, which are interesting. That lingonberry porridge, meanwhile, looks fantastic!
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Oct 13, 2019 06:12
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I love rodgrod med flod. This one gets my vote
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Oct 13, 2019 13:24
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Butter is one of those things that just never seems worth making yourself, but vermont creamery's cultured butter has started to become a staple and is a little more expensive/opens up a wider flavor profile to toy with than just butter. May use the "let yogurt sit for a day or two" template alongside my next sourdough loaf.
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Oct 13, 2019 14:15
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Of all the entries, I want to make your rice pastries and lingonberry porridge the most 
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Oct 13, 2019 14:51
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So thinking about doing a cultured butter, rather than just having it with some flaky salt mixed in - how do you think it would work being the base of a compound butter? Thanksgiving is coming up and I was going to do a stick of each of a tarragon red wine butter as well as a black garlic butter. Thinking about trying your cultured approach and then doing the compounds on top.
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Oct 18, 2019 18:30
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| # ? May 4, 2024 09:00 |
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Nephzinho posted:So thinking about doing a cultured butter, rather than just having it with some flaky salt mixed in - how do you think it would work being the base of a compound butter? Thanksgiving is coming up and I was going to do a stick of each of a tarragon red wine butter as well as a black garlic butter. Thinking about trying your cultured approach and then doing the compounds on top. Black garlic compound butter I would absolutely try with cultured butter, red wine butter I'm not so sure of. I'd be worried about making the butter too sour to mesh well with the wine flavours, but I suppose that depends on both the wine and what you'd be using the butter for.
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Oct 19, 2019 23:29
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