Black Trumpet Sausage ‒ Mustatorvisienimakkara

Mustamakkara, literally "black sausage" is very likely the most famous speciality of my home city Tampere. It's basically a groat sausage which gets its Gothic colour from blood and is usually served with lingonberry sauce. For years I've had this weird urge to make a vegan version out of it (Hey why not? Edinbourgh is full of pubs serving vegan haggis.) but had absolutely no idea what I could use in it.

As I've mentioned before, there are several traditional Finnish sausage types with no meat in them. I was especially delighted to find a recipe for a mushroom sausage that is otherwise vegetarian but uses real intestines as mold. I wouldn't know how to get those even if I wanted to, but this gave me an idea of using black trumpets when mushrooms are called for. They should naturally make a black sausage, so this might be an idea in line with the name. My version is a bit different though, containing gluten flour for added firmness and fillingness.

I've never actually tasted the blood version so I did some questioning among my friends who had. Apparently some versions do taste like blood while others don't. That sounded like a relief. While you could easily add an effervescent tablet to bring the iron taste into this, it doesn't sound like something I'd really like my sausage to taste like. Especially when black trumpets have such a discreet taste on their own.

- 300 g salt-pickled black trumpets
- 5 dl water
- 4 dl gluten flour
- 2 dl oat cream
- 1.5 dl whole barley grains
- 100 g fresh soy cheese
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 tbsp canola oil
- white pepper

Cook the barley in salted water. Mince the garlic. Rinse and drain the mushrooms couple of times, then cut them into smaller pieces. Mix all the ingredients except the gluten flour. Start kneading the flour into the rest by your hand, a small amount at a time, to get it evenly mixed with the rest of the sausage. If there seems to be too much of the dry stuff, add a dollop of water, but carefully, since you don't them to become too soggy.

Take a fistful of the mass and roll into a bar. Wrap into folio and roll some more. Repeat for the rest of the mass. I got myself six large sausages from this amount. Bake in a 175°C oven for an hour. Enjoy as a snack or on the dinner, preferably with lingonberry or cranberry sauce.

Nutritional values / 1 sausage / 242 g:
energy 308,5 kcal
fat 11,5 g
protein 29,3 g
carbohydrates 22,5 g
fiber 4,5 g

Soy Lihapiirakka ‒ Soijalihis

This is a bit of a deviation from the "seasonal" theme since lihapiirakkas are sold rather evenly around the year. The name literally means "meat pie" which gave me some trouble naming the soy version since I don't think anyone would understand if I just called them soy pies. You do see a lot of naming variance like "meatless pie" or "soy meat pie", but I decided to go with a shortening in Finnish and keep the English name intact since it's already detached from the original meaning. Anyway, they're deep-fried pastries made from a doughnut type of dough and filled with rice and minced meat. Or, in the vegan version, usually rice and TVP.

Lihapiirakkas are an extremely popular fast food in Finland. You can find them cheap from practically every food store's convenience food section. Non-chain-owned street kiosks sell them even in the smallest villages with one shop and no restaurants, along with french fries and hamburgers. In bigger cities you have a chance of finding them all self-made and vegan. Quite often they're cut in half and filled with things.

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine ate at least one of them every day after school, filling them with ketchup and liver sausage, along with a glass of cold cocoa as the drink option. To her and her parents' defence I have to say my diet at the time wasn't exactly from the healthiest end either.

The regular kiosk filling includes what I like to call "the grill spices", the holy trinity of ketchup, mustard and cucumber relish. In case of cheap cucumber relish raw onion is also often added for crunchiness. With a little extra fee the fillings may include different meat products, but nothing stops from using the same forms made from plant-based ingredients, like bean patties, chickpea omelettes or soy weeners. The kiosks often serve their own specialities and understanding the subtle differences takes a real connoisseur. For a little vocabulary, these have become regional dishes known nation-wide:

Atomi and vety (Lappeenranta): "Atom and hydrogen". Vety includes a boiled egg and ham, atomi either one of these.
Hotsi (Hämeenlinna): It's role model probably being hot dog, hotsi is filled with half cut lauantaimakkara or "Saturday sausage", a certain thick and floury sausage type. In Forssa two wieners are used instead.
Möttönen (Helsinki): An especially big and thick lihapiirakka which were originally sold at the main train railway station.
Riihimäkeläinen (Riihimäki): Includes a fried egg and a minced meat patty. In Rovaniemi the same version is called ropsilainen after the local football team.
Lörtsy (Savonlinna): The good people of Savonlinna are probably going to hang me from balls for implying these are the same thing, and I do need to write a separate post about them sometime later. I haven't been able to find a recipe for lörtsy or any "official" difference in their dough, but lörtsys are about twice as large and always flat. They're one of the oldest variants and have been around since the fifties. Originally they had an apple jam filling instead of meat but nowadays you can find them in all possible sweet and savory flavours.

The dough
- 14 dl wheat flour (many prefer a version where some of this is graham)
- 6 dl oat milk
- 50 g yeast
- 2 tbsp rape oil
- 1 tbsp dark syrup
- 1 tbsp salt

 The filling
- 2.5 dl soy crumble
- 1.5 dl barley grains
- 1 dl roasted onion
- 1 dose of stock
- 2 tbsp rape oil
- 1 tbsp apple wine vinegar
- smoked paprika
- white pepper
- salt

Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water. Add the oil, the syrup and the salt. Knead in enough flour to achieve a consistency that doesn't stick to the bowl but still feels a bit runny. Cover with a towel and let rest for an hour.

Cook the barley. Soak the soy crumble in water where you've added the stock. Fry on the pan, adding the spices as you go. Combine the barley, the soy and the onion.

Divide the dough into 16 pieces. Roll each of them round between your hands, flatten and roll into a disc of about 15 cm in diameter. Keep more flour at hand to help the dough from sticking. Scoop a spoonful or two of the filling in the middle of the disc. Fold one edge on the opposite one and press it to keep it closed. Secure the edges by pressing with a fork.

Deep fry from both sides until golden in neutral tasting oil that is fine with high temperatures, for example non-virgin rape oil.

Nutritional values / 1 lihapiirakka / 114 g (before deep frying):
energy 299 kcal
fat 7 g
protein 10 g
carbohydrates 48 g
fiber 4 g

Aronia and Rye Foam ‒ Aronia-ruisvaahto

Oh crap,  seems I've caught myself a cold. Not exactly the thing I'd need at the end of pregnancy, which already itself makes me feel tired. I wouldn't want to use medication either unless it's necessary. Just hope this goes away before the actual labour takes place. And I'll try to eat a lot of berries to tank up with vitamin C and antioxidants. You know that annoying word "superfood"? It gets flashed around a lot when talking about aronia.

Flipping throgh a book about regional Finnish dishes I realized you can make vispipuuro or lingonberry foam with rye flour too. Another recipe I found used bilberries which always pair nicely with rye. I thought I'd try aronia instead. Just like rose, it's a very common decoration bush, but the big, yielding berries rarely get used. People don't seem to realize they're edible, though they make excellent juices, wines and jellies. Perhaps because the taste is so much on the sour side they're not really a nice thing to eat straight from the bush.

The consistency isn't quite as fluffy as in the semolina version, but still surprisingly so. If you want to add the effect, you can whip some vanilla foam into the result too. The ingredient proportions in different versions seem to vary quite a lot, so feel free to experiment with them as well.

- 3 dl water
- 3 dl aronia berries
- 1.5 dl rye flour
- 1 dl sugar

Bring the water to a boil. Add the sugar and the berries. Let simmer until the sugar has dissolved. Whisk in the flour as well. Remove from heat and start to beat with an electric mixer. Continue at least 15 minutes for a fluffy structure.

Nutritional values / 670 g:

energy 745 kcal
fat 3 g
protein 13 g
carbohydrates 166 g
fiber 25 g

Tuuvinki

There are four standars casseroles in the standing Finnish Yule table: carrot, rutabaga, liver and potato. The idea is to take just couple of spoonfuls of each so they'll form a colourful medley of tastes. They're designed to get better and better when rewarmed again and again during those magical days of night.

My definite favourite of these is the potato version tuuvinki that is sweetened naturally. Some people just use dark syrup or sweet potato instead of waiting but I call that cheating.

- 1 kg potatoes (floury variety)
- 4 dl oat milk
- 2 tablespoons wheat flour
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 2 tablespoons margarine

Cook and mash the potatoes. Add the wheat flour (as well as some water if the potatoes seem dry) and pour the mashed potatoes into a casserole. Leave to sweeten in a warm place for a night. If you don't have one set your oven to the lowest temperature possible and keep the mash there for a few hours.

Taste. If the potatoes haven't sweetened enough on their own (= the place you chose wasn't warm enough) you can pour in a tablespoon of dark syrup at this point. Stir in the other ingredients as well. Top with margarine pieces. Bake 3 hours in a 150°C oven.

Nutritional values / 1451 g (also see Fineli):
energy 1033 kcal
fat 25 g
protein 22 g
carbohydrates 174 g
fiber 20 g

Tokero

Talkkuna (or kama in Estonian) means a finely milled mixture of roasted grains or pea flour. The combination varies a lot according to the province, as well as the right way to eat it. Today it's mostly used in desserts but a hundred years ago it was combined practically with anything to form a quick snack. In Tavastia talkkuna was normally mixed with sour milk products but in South Ostrobothnia it was coped together with berries and in Savo it was used with pork lard. My home town even has a street named Tokerotie since during the building in the great hunger years the workers got talkkuna porridge for salary.

Talkkuna's taste is hard to describe. As a kid I hated it, now I've come to love the bizarre combination of chocolaty and malty flavours. I've often envied the way today's Estonian kitchen seems to use talkkuna much more creatively than Finns do. Even though our test group recently decided that an Estonian chocolate bar spiced with kama tasted like old stockings, I did notice that kama and coffee used in that bar might actually make a great combination. So here's a coffee-spiked simple talkkuna snack or dessert.

- 1 dl talkkuna
- 1 dl coffee (or to be a purist, water or oat milk)
- black currants
- raspberries
(- sugar)

Mix the talkkuna and the coffee. Top with berries. Sprinkle sugar on top if you wish.

Nutritional values / 200 g (without sugar):
energy 192 kcal
fat 2 g
protein 5 g
carbohydrates 36 g
fiber 7 g

Sahti

If you don't know sahti, you don't know beers. This primordial Finnish top-fermented beer is among the oldest still brewed beer types in the world. If there hadn't been a prohibition law in Finland from 1919 to 1932 it would also be the longest brewed beer type for sale ‒ officially. That crown now belongs to another fine beer, Belgian lambic, which also happens to have the probably closest resemblance of sahti.

Sahti's taste is soft, sweet and thick, often described as banana-like. Instead of hops it's flavoured with juniper. It doesn't bubble much and stores only a month at most the fridge. The old poems describe mash bushel being lifted on the roof for the thunder (=ukkonen) god Ukko water it and then fermented with the drool of a horny boar. And as you probably understand from this description sahti has a special place in certain pagan feasts.

At the moment I'm making my very first round of sahti for the most important holiday of the year, midsummer, the nightless day. This feast originally known as Vakkajuhla (= bushel feast) used to be celebrated with a big punch of friends by a lake to ask Ukko send rain for the harvest to grow. Christian invaders turned pretty much all the Finnish feasts to have Christian meanings but the only thing they managed to change in this one was its name: it's nowadays known as Juhannus which refers to John the Baptist. It still involves gatherings by lakes, drinking and eating, bonfires and fertility rites. I'll update this post after I've seen how my sahti turns out but I thought I'd post this plan already in the hope of inspiring the rest of you to try as well.

To be a purist you should keep in mind that:
1. Sahti doesn't contain hops. Instead it's usually flavoured with juniper (though I've heard some other herbs like heather or wild rosemary have been used as well).
2. Sahti is always made of barley malts. Some people also use rye or caramel malts but only small amounts for flavouring.
3. Don't use added sugar. All the sugar should come from the malts and sahti isn't supposed to sparkle either. You won't need sugar even in the bottling stage since it can't be stored long anyways. Besides, well cooked wort should already produce 10-11 % beer which in most beer types is more than enough to make it taste like alcohol and thus ruin its own taste.
4. Never let the mash temperature rise over 70°C or you'll get porridge. The wort shouldn't be cooked at all, only quickly sterilized at most.
5. The most common yeast used today is common baking yeast, not normal ale yeast. This gives sahti a distinct flavour. (Of course in the old times people just saved some yeast from every round for the next one. I wouldn't want to annoy an angry boar.)
6. Approximately, 1 kg of malts makes about 2 l of sahti. Yes, it's thick.
7. Sahti is served unfiltered. Actually the leftover yeast helps it last better.
8. Three most important things to remember are cleanliness, cleanliness and cleanliness. Sterilize all the tools you use, including your hands.

Of course, rules only exists to be broken. But if you do make exceptions to please your own taste then please don't call your beer sahti. You may feel it doesn't change that much if you use hops but names used very broadly cease to really mean anything. Here's what I did:

- 3 l sahti malts
- 3 dl rye malts
- 20 g juniper berries
- 7 l water
- 50 g baking yeast

Sterilize all your equipments. Put 3 l of water in a big pot and let it come to a boil. Add the malts. Keep stirring until you've got a porridge. Heat up until the temperature has reached 70°C and make sure it doesn't rise further. Simmer for an hour. Crush the juniper berries and throw them in. Simmer another three hours. Taste to make sure it's sweet enough. It's also desirable to measure the gravity at this point so it'll be easier to trace what went wrong.

Filter and pour into an air tight fermentation vessel (with airlock). Boil the rest of the water and pour in. When the temperature has dropped to about 20°C add the yeast, dissolved in a mug of lukewarm water. Let your sahti-to-be ferment in room temperature as long as it wants to. This should take about 3-5 days. Check the gravity again and bottle your sahti and store in cold for a week. Apparently, the bigger the barrel the longer the taste lasts. Don't leave room for oxygen. If you see a foam your sahti hasn't finished yet and shouldn't be drunk (unless you want stains in your underpants).

Ask your friends over to drink your sahti fresh! Here's a suggested drinking song as well.

Rievä of Tampere ‒ Tampereen riävä

Not sure why my attempts to make white loaf from levain always end up in the trash can. They're usually just tough, dry and bland. I've already thrown away two baking sheets of rievä, the local soft barley bread (the very name of which means fresh.) Third time I just took a basic recipe that uses a huge amount of yeast but even that didn't go as planned. I kept adding more and more flour to the dough and it kept looking runny enough to be used for pancakes. Comparison between different rievä recipes helped to identify the problem: looks like the amount of water had been doubled at some point!

So I did manage to make edible barley bread eventually. Still, I'm doing something wrong. It's just normal white bread, not that kind of fluffy and soft-textured it's supposed to be. Anyway, here's the edited recipe for you to defeat me:

5 dl lukewarm water
2 tsp salt
70 g yeast
9 dl barley flour
6 dl soft wheat flour (At least I think this is the English term though in Finnish it's called "coarse flour" for a reason unknown to me.)

Dissolve the yeast and the salt in the water. Add the wheat flour and stir even. Keep adding the barley flour until the dough starts to detach from the bowl. Even the surface sprinkle some flour on it and make a cross on it with your fingers. Cover with a towel and leave it in a warm place for half an hour.

Flour the table and your hands. Knead the dough until it feels firm. Form four hemispheres of it, put them on a baking sheet and press them gently lower with your palm. Cover them with a towel and come back after half an hour. (Longer rising time makes them tougher.)

Punch holes on the surface of the rieväs with a fork. Bake them in a 250°C oven for 35 minutes. The orthodox way to eat rievä is with fingers, untouched by a knife. Perfect for a picnic!

Nutritional values / 1 rievä:
energy 815 kcal
fat 5 g
protein 26 g
carbohydrates 165 g
fiber 14 g

Mämmi

Some of you may have wondered what the name of my blog means. Mämmi is a traditional sweet rye pudding that's today known mostly as an Easter dessert. The sweet dish nowadays known as mämmi was originally eaten only in the Southwest whereas elsewhere in Finland a runnier sweet-and-sour dish also known in Eastern Europe was prepared.

One of my many plans is to tell you more ways to use mämmi all around the year. In the meanwhile go and find a book called Mämmi-kirja by Ahmed Ladarsi, the founder of The Finnish Mämmi Association. I'm sure I will. It's got 80 different recipes that use mämmi as a main ingredient.

For starters you need some mämmi. The recipes differ greatly, so I just followed the one that seemed most convincing (which in my case means taking the longest time to let it sweeten naturally). Now I've got four casseroles full of it and they won't all fit into my freezer. At some point I may have to try if this can be done as a smaller dose.

5 l water
1 kg rye malts
1.5 kg rye flour
0.5 tsp salt

If you wish:
2 tbsp powdered bitter orange rind (Of course this isn't an original spice but it is commonly added. Funny thing is that I've never seen any other recipe even mention the whole fruit.)

Heat 2 l water to a boil and pour it into a 10 l bucket. Add half of the malts and one fifth of the flour. Whisk well. Sprinkle a thick layer of flour on the surface. Cover the bucket tightly and leave it to sweeten for about two hours hours in a warm place.

Pour another round of hot water into the bucket. Add the rest of the malts and some flour. Whisk, sprinkle and cover as you did last time. Keep adding water and flour every two hours until they're finished. (I for example made four rounds.)

After the last sweetening whisk the mixture cool. Add the salt and the bitter orange at this point. Fill casseroles (or tuokkonens if you're happy enough to have some) half full but be careful not o overfill since mämmi may flood. Put them into a 150°C oven for three hours. Stir occasionally to prevent a hard crust from forming.

Conserve in cold. Mämmi is at its best after couple of days. The classic way is to serve it in a tuokkonen, a box made of birch park. Even commercial mämmis often have a birch print on their carton boxes. Try sugar and oat milk, whipped oat cream, vanilla sauce or ice cream with it.

Besides on its own, mämmi can be used in many, many ways in desserts, breads, beverages, sauces and even main courses. Anywhere you wish to have its smooth and sweet but malty flavour. We'll get back to that.

Nutritional values / 7500 g (counted from the ingedients, also check Fineli):
energy: 8365 kcal
fat: 52 g
protein: 263 g
carbohydrates: 1685 g
fiber: 368 g

Sour Rye Loaf in a Tavastian Manner ‒ Hapan ruisleipä hämäläiseen tapaan

My very first rye bread is here! Oh my, is it delicious.

Here in Western Finland bread was baked only once or twice a year and then dried in the rafter of the house. That's the origin of those famous round breads with a hole in the middle. This kind of soft loaf or limppu was only eaten as a festive meal.

I've seen this same recipe in several forums (here, here and here for example) but none of the posters seem to mention any earlier source. Well, here it comes anyways.

The sponge (or raski):

- 300 - 500 g levain (about a fist sized glop)
- 1 l lukewarm water
- 0.6 kg rye flour

Mix the ingredients loosely. Let it leaven at least half a day. You know the bouillie is sour enough if it bubbles.

The dough:

- The sponge
- 2 tbsp salt dissolved in 0.5 l lukewarm water
- 1.2 - 1.4 kg rye flour

Mix the ingredients and knead the dough well. Cover with a towel and let it rise for at least half a day.

Save a piece of the dough for the next time you bake. If that's not going to be anytime soon, put it in the freezer so your small friends won't die. Form four loaves and put them on an oven shelf. (I only made two big ones. That wasn't too wise. They nearly climbed out from the shelf.) Let them rise a couple of hours under a towel and then stick holes in them with a fork. Bake first in 225°C for half an hour and then an hour in 175°C. Cover the warm loaves with a towel.

Unless you have a big crowd eating these you better freeze three of the four loaves to prevent them from hardening. A bred kept in a fridge quickly turns stale.

I find these already have a nice malty flavour, but next time I might try what happens if I add malts as well as some berries. Or a hint of dark syrup and caraway which by a rule of thumb always fit together with rye.

Nutritional values / one bread / 875 g:
energy 1525 kcal
fat 10 g
protein 48.5 g
carbohydrates 305 g
fiber 75 g

Tavastian Rye Rusks ‒ Hämäläiset ruiskorput

During the last talvennapa (An old pagan feast around January 13th to celebrate the ending of joulu ‒ that is Christmas time ‒ and welcome the Sun or Päivätär back.) I tried a Tavastian rusk my friend had baked for the occasion. I bit but it wouldn't break. I gnawed but it didn't do much help either. Eventually it took me about an hour to finish the damn thing. And since I still got some tooth left I decided I have to make those myself. I mean we never have anything to offer for the guests cause we hoard everything ourselves, probably to survive over winter. These have coped well, almost like dwarf bread, Terry Pratchett's parody of lembas.

Got this recipe from another friend (Thanks Lemelina!) who was also the source for the baker of the ones I had crunched. Only tweaked it by changing the cow milk into soy milk (which I find richer than oat milk) and butter into margarine.

- 6 dl soy milk
- 50 g yeast
- 3 tsp salt
- 1 dl dark syrup
- 2 tbsp caraway
- 13 dl rye flour
- 200 g margarine (for example Keiju 70%)

Dissolve the yeast into lukewarm milk. Mix in everything else except the margarine. Start with a wooden fork and continue by hand. Now also add the margarine. Let the dough rise under a kerchief for couple of hours.

Knead the dough even and form oval buns out of it. Bake them in 225°C for 8‒10 minutes. Let them cool down a little. Halve them with a fork and place on the baking sheet with the split side upwards. Put the rusks back in the oven you already turned off and let them brown in the residual heat. If your oven doesn't keep warm, put it on a mild temperature like 50°C until the rusks are dry.

At first I thought I did something wrong cause my rusks seemed edible. But eventually they dried on their own. Now they're perfect and yummy!

Nutritional values / 1 rusk / about 50 g
energy 123 kcal
fat 5 g
protein 3 g
carbohydrates 17 g
fiber 4 g