Buckwheat Bread Rolls for Breakfast

Everybody loves freshly baked bread rolls for breakfast. These are easy to make, just mix the ingredients together in the night, shape into balls and bake in the morning.

Here in Finland buckwheat is mostly used as a gluten-free alternative to wheat, rye and barley, but I’d like to see this tasty grain used more among non-coeliacs too. I like to make these bread rolls with combination of buckwheat and wheat, but I’ve added a gluten-fee option to the recipe too.

Breakfast Bread Rolls

3 dl cold water
12 g yeast (1/4 package)
pinch of salt
1 dl buckwheat flour
1,5 dl buckwheat flakes
3,5 dl wheat flour

In the night before: dissolve the yeast and salt into water. Stir in buckwheat flour and flakes. Add enough wheat flour to make soft dough. Make 9 balls and put them on a baking sheet. Cover with a towel and transfer to the fridge.

In the morning: Put the baking sheet into the cold oven and turn it to 225 Celsius degrees. Bake until golden brown, 20-30 minutes. The baking time can be shorter or longer, depends on how quickly your oven heats.

Gluten free option: Use gluten free flour mix instead of wheat flour. Make sure the mix is vegan, some gluten free flour mixes include milk powder. The bread rolls won’t rise as nicely as with wheat flour, so consider patting them flat in the first place.

Tofu Tuesday: Spanakopita

Our last recipe in VeganMoFo 2014 is a Greek classic: Spanakopita. Traditionally they’re filled with spinach and feta, so vegan version is naturally filled with spinach and tofu. Once again this has been fun, but blogging every day is also a lot of work. I hope randomofo will be up in October too, I love to browse blogs through it.

A Joyrney with Tiffany nominated us for Liebster Award. Thank you for the honour, but we have to pass answering the questions and nominating other blogs. Today it’s already time to go to bed, and tomorrow after work we’ll have to get ready for a little holiday trip.

Spanakopita

1 package filo pastry (450 g)
about 2 dl olive oil for brushing

450 g frozen spinach
2 onions, chopped
450 g tofu
3 tbsp nutritional yeast
3 tbsp chopped dill
3 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped mint
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
0,5 tsp pepper

Thaw the filo pastry according to the instructions on the package. Meanwhile prepare the filling. Sauté spinach and onion on a non-stick pan until water has evaporated. Allow to cool a bit. Crumble tofu in a bowl and add the rest of the filling ingredients.

Cut the filo pastry into strips, about 10 cm wide. Take one strip and place it on the table. Brush with olive oil. Put a heaping tablespoon of the filling in to one end. Fold one corner to form a triangle and continue folding until the strip is wrapped around the filling. It’s hard to explain, so check this picture. Brush with olive oil and put on a baking sheet. Make the rest of the pies the same way. Bake 10-15 minutes in 225 Celsius degrees.

Flour Friday: Apple Bread

This recipe is from a 1988 Finnish magazine Nomad’s grandmother had saved for some reason. Maybe for the many recipes for breads it has, a lot of them look really great. Anyway, considering its the harvest season and apples are plentiful this year (well, at least over here they are), here’s a bread which calls for apples. It also has cinnamon, which in combination with the apples brings a wonderful holiday aroma into your house while baking!

Apple Loaves

2,5 dl plant based milk (I used oat milk)
25 g yeast
1 tsp salt
0,5 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp sugar
3,5 dl grated apples
9-10 dl bread flour
0,25 dl oil

Heat the milk a little and dissolve yeast in it. Add salt, cinnamon, sugar and grated apples. Knead a dough with bread flour, add oil in the end of kneading. Cover with a towel and allow to rise.

Punch the dough down and form two bread loaves. Put them on baking sheet, cover with a towel and allow to rise again. Cut shallow slits with a sharp knife on the surface of the risen breads. Bake in 200 Celsius degrees for half an hour or until done. The bread is ready when it sounds hollow when you knock the bottom of the bread.

Tomato Thursday: Croissants

In Finland croissant is called sarvi (horn) because of it’s shape. They can be flaky or more like bread rolls. They be filled with nearly anything, but ham, cheese and chocolate are probably most popular fillings.

Tomato and Leek Croissants

filling: 
8 cm piece of leek
2 garlic cloves
2 tbsp oil
3 big tomatoes
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp thyme
½ tsp sugar
salt, pepper

dough:
2 dl soy milk or other plant based milk
25 g yeast
½ tsp salt
1 dl barley flour
5,5 dl wheat flour
100 g margarine, room temperature

sesame or poppy seeds

Chop the leek and garlic. Heat the oil in a pan and sauté leek and garlic 5 minutes. Chop the tomatoes, you can also scald them before chopping if you want to. Add tomatoes herbs and sugar to the pan and continue sautéing until tomatoes are a bit mushy and there’s not much liquid left. Allow to cool a bit.

Warm the milk and add yeast and salt. Stir until dissolved. Add barley flour and 5 dl wheat flour and stir to combine. Add margarine and knead, add little more wheat flour if needed. Roll half of the dough into a circle, about 30 cm diameter. Cut into 6 sectors, or 8 if you want to make smaller croissants. Put couple of teaspoons of tomato filling on each sector and roll them starting from the wider end and shape them as croissants. Repeat with the other half of the dough. Put croissants on baking sheet and cover with a towel, allow to rise 10-20 minutes. Brush with water and sprinkle sesame or poppy seeds on top. Bake 10-15 minutes in 225 Celsius degrees.

Flour Friday: Cupcakes

I’m going to visit my mother for the weekend and I’m going to surprise her and my sisters with these cupcakes. (Unless they see this blog post before I get there, then it won’t be a surprise.)

You can also make muffins with this recipe by skipping the frosting part. Actually you may want to make less frosting anyway, I still have about half of the frosting in the fridge.

Apple Cupcakes

2 dl wheat flour
1 dl rolled oats
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
0,75 dl sugar
1,75 dl oat or soy milk
0,5 dl oil
2 dl diced apple

frosting:
100 g margarine, room temperature
3,5 dl icing sugar
1 small apple finely grated (3 tbsp)
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla sugar
cinnamon for decorating

Combine flour, oats, baking powder, vanilla sugar, cinnamon and sugar in a bowl. Add milk, oil and apples and stir to mix. Line a muffin tin with paper muffin liners. You can also bake the cupcakes without paper liners. If you don’t have a muffin tin, put paper liners on a baking sheet, but use two paper liners for each cupcake, put the liners one inside another to make them stronger. Divide the batter to liners, you can fill them almost full. The recipe makes about 9 cupcakes, or more or less depending the size of your muffin tin / liners. Bake in 175 Celsius degrees about 20 minutes. Use a matchstick to check if they’re ready: if the matchstick comes clean out of the cupcake they’re ready. Allow to cool before decorating.

Beat margarine and icing sugar with electric mixer until creamy. Stir in grated apple, lemon juice and vanilla sugar. Put the frosting to the piping bag and pipe on your cupcakes. Dust with little bit of cinnamon.

Slow Food Sunday: Root Vegetable Pie

Remember Rutabaga Kukko we blogged about couple of years ago? Here’s another version of kukko, this time it’s filled with mixed root vegetables. You can have fresh kukko for breakfast if you bake it the night before and simmer it wrapped in towel overnight.

Rutabaga Kukko

200 g rutabaga
200 g parsnip
5 carrots
about 2 dl water
salt
1 tbsp uncooked rice
margarine

dough:
4 dl rye flour
4 dl wheat flour
1 tsp salt
3 dl water

Peel the root vegetables and slice thinly. Put them, water and some salt to a pot and simmer until half done. Drain

Mix the dough ingredients in a bowl. Roll into a circle or oval, edges can be thinner. Sprinkle the rice in the center of the circle/oval, it will absorb all the extra moisture. Put some root vegeatble slices on the dough, sprinkle with salt and put few dollops of margarine on top. Continue until you have all the root vegetables on the dough. Put more margarine dollops on top. Fold the edges of the dough on top of the pie. Close tightly, water and gentle rubbing will help.

Bake in 200 Celsius degrees 1-1,5 hours. Brush with mixture of melted margarine and water. Wrap in greaseproof paper and then wrap in a towel. You can then either wrap it in a blanket or put back to oven if it has cooled to 100 or less degrees. Keep wrapped at least couple of hours, but over night is better. This simmering part is important, it makes the crust softer and enhances the flavours of the filling.

Serve with margarine.

Flour Friday: Archipelago Bread

The southwestern Finland is rather famous of its sweet and very dark breads. There’s no definitive way how to make them, there are quite likely as many recipes as there are bakers. I picked up this recipe from some magazine, substituted the sour milk with a mixture of soy milk and yogurt and off to baking I went. The result was a truly wonderful bread, which is why we want to share it with you.

 

Archipelago Bread

The “sour milk”:

3,5 dl plain soy yoghurt
3 dl soy milk

Rest of the ingredients:

A package of yeast (50g)
2 dl molasses
2 tsp salt

2 dl wheat bran
2 dl rye flour
2 dl beer malts
6,5 – 7 dl wheat flour

Mix together yoghurt and milk to create the faux sour milk. Warm it up to 37 Celsius degrees and add the yeast, salt and molasses. Combine with wheat bran, rye flour and beer malt. Add wheat flour. Don’t worry if the dough seems worryingly loose or fluid at this point. Let rise under a towel for an hour.

Take two baking casseroles and line them with parchment paper. The bins should be big enough for the dough to half fill them. Cover with a blanket and let raise for another hour.

The dough should have risen now to more or less fill the casseroles (or maybe even a bit over the edges.) Bake in the oven at 175C for 1 hour and 20-50 minutes. When the top looks ready and your kitchen smells wonderful, they’re ready.

If you want a deluxe bread, brush the breads with a mixture of molasses and water after you have removed them from the oven and taken out of the bins.

Let cool and enjoy.

Tomato Thursday: Quiche

In my lacto-ovo days I used to make a cheesy tomato and basil quiche. It was great, but I had never thought about veganizing it, I had kind of forgotten it even existed. But basil plants growing on our window sill reminded me of it, and I decided to try to make a vegan version. I used basic crust recipe and filled the quiche with Tofutti cream cheese and fresh basil and tomatoes. And here’s the result:

The original quiche had grated cheese on top, but I omitted it in this vegan version. If you want to make extra cheesy quiche, add some melting vegan cheese on top.

Basil and Tomato Quiche

crust:
100 g margarine
1 dl whole wheat flour
2 dl wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp water

filling:
1 tub Tofutti cream cheese
2 tbsp plain soy yogurt (or soy milk or cream)
fresh basil leaves
3-4 tomatoes
salt, pepper

Preheat the oven to 225 Celsius degrees. Crumble the margarine, both flours and baking powder in a bowl. Add a little water to form a dough. Grease a pie dish and spread the dough in it. Bake 8-10 minutes.

Whisk Tofutti and soy yogurt until soft and easily spreadable. Spread on prebaked crust. Cover cheese with fresh basil leaves and sprinkle some salt and pepper. Put a layer of tomato slices on top. Bake until it’s ready. Unfortunately I can’t tell you the correct time, because I didn’t check the time while baking. Besides, I baked my quiche a little too long.

Flour Friday: Pizza

This cheesy goodness is completely vegan!

My favourite hobby in autumn is picking mushrooms, so we often eat forest mushroom. But if forest mushrooms aren’t available, you can substitute them with any mushrooms you can get. You can also use oat milk or any other plant based milk instead of soy milk, but in that case you may need to add a little more flour.

Mushroom Pizza

dough:
2,5 dl water
12 g (1/4 package) yeast
1 tsp sugar
pinch of salt
1-2 dl rolled oats
5-6 dl wheat flour
1-2 tbsp oil

toppings:
ketchup or mixture of ketchup and tomato puree
2 l chopped forest mushrooms (we had a combination of chanterelles and porchini)
1 tbsp oil
fresh basil and oregano

cheese sauce:
4 dl soy milk
4 tbsp flour
3 tbsp nutritional yeast
0,5 dl oil
1,5 tbsp ketchup
0,5 tsp paprika
0,5 tsp garlic powder
salt, pepper

Combine water, yeast, sugar and salt and stir until everything is dissolved in water. Stir in oats and knead a dough with a wheat flour, you may need little less or more. Add oil in the end of the kneading. Cover with a towel and allow to rise until doubled in size. Punch down and roll into rectangle size of a baking sheet, or make 2 round pizzas. Cover again with towel and allow to rise while you prepare the toppings.

Sauté the mushrooms on a pan until the water comes out of them. Discard the water or continue sautéing until it’s evaporated. Add oil and fry few minutes.

Whisk all the sauce ingredients together in a saucepan. Heat on medium (medium-high) heat, stirring frequently, until the sauce starts bubbling and gets thicker.

Spread a thin layer of ketchup on pizza dough, and spread the mushrooms next. Sprinkle herbs on top of the mushrooms. Pour cheese sauce all over the pizza and bake 20 minutes (or until it looks ready) in 225 Celsius degrees. Allow to cool a little before cutting.

Vegan Pizza Day

Since today is Vegan Pizza Day, we had pizza for dinner. Home made crust and tomato sauce, and tofu, olives, fresh tomatoes, sun dried tomatoes, onions, artichokes, seitan and bell pepper on top. Om nom nom.