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.

Waldorf Salad

Apple harvest in Finland is great this year, and many people have more apples than they can eat.

Apple pie and jam are of course delicious, but if you’re already getting bored of them, try this salad. Celery, walnuts and raisins are combined with apples and the salad is finished with vegan mayo dressing. Yum!

6 celery stalks
3 apples (4-5 if they’re small)
2 dl raisins
3 dl walnuts (about 100g)

dressing:
1 dl vegan mayo
2 dl plain soy yogurt
2 tsp mustard
2 tbsp lemon juice
pinch of salt and pepper

Slice or dice the celery, save some leaves for garnishing. Dice the apples. You should have approximately same amount of celery and apples. Coarsely chop the walnuts. Mix all the salad ingredients in a bowl. Mix the dressing ingredients in another bowl and combine with the salad. Garnish the salad with celery leaves. Preferably refrigerate a while before serving.

Cruelty-free Baked Poussins

Middle Eastern cuisine is full of vegetarian and vegan dishes, and it would have been easy to blog about them for a week. Since our Saturday theme was veganizing, I was browsing Soheila Kimberly’s Middle Eastern cookbook to find a recipe that was tempting enough to veganize. A recipe for poussins baked in yogurt sauce caught my eye, even if I didn’t know what’s a poussin (it’s a young chicken, I know now). I used plain soy yogurt for the sauce and baked sliced tofu in it. I marinaded them for few hours, but I recommend marinading them over night, because when I reheated the leftovers next day, the flavour had grown better. We served the baked tofu with fried potatoes seasoned with sumac and some salad.

Tofu in Yogurt Sauce

500 g tofu

sauce:
500 g plain soy yogurt
4 tbsp olive oil
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
0,5 tsp paprika
pinch of saffron powder or 2-3 saffron strands
4 tbsp lemon juice
salt and pepper

Cut the tofu in 1 cm slices. Peel and chop the onion and garlic. If you use saffron strands, mix them with 1 tsp of hot water. Mix all the sauce ingredients together. Add the tofu slices and stir carefully. Allow to marinade in fridge at least 4 hours, preferably over night. Arrange the tofu slices in a wide ovenproof dish. Bake about 40 minutes in 200 Celsius degrees.

Polish Cucumber Salad

You can find quite many different cucumber salads around the world. Raita in India, tzatziki in Greece, vinegar cucumbers in Finland… And mizeria in Poland. Mizeria is usually made with cucumbers and sour cream, bur our vegan version is made with soy yogurt. By the way, this is awesome and really refreshing!

Mizeria

1,5-2 dl soy yogurt
1 green house cucumber or couple of pickling cucumbers
salt
2 tsp white vine vinegar or apple vinegar
pepper
1 tsp dried dill or 1 tbsp fresh

Strain the yogurt with a cheese cloth until it gets thicker. Wash (and peel) the cucumber and thinly slice. Put the cucumbers in colander, sprinkle with generous amount of salt and mix well. Let sit for half an hour. Rinse the cucumber and squeeze out excess water. Put the cucumbers in a bowl, add enough drained soy yogurt to barely cover them (the cucumbers shouldn’t be swimming in yogurt). Season with vinegar, pepper and dill. Add salt if needed. Serve as a side salad.

Advent Calendar

Some years ago my sister made me an advent calendar, I think it was 2005 or 2007. The calendar is made of two green ribbons and there are 12 small bags on each. Each bag contained a recipe and a small surprise (stickers, candy etc.). Next year I filled the calendar and sent it bag to my sister and we’ve been sending it to each other every year since.

This year it was my turn to fill the calendar. I won’t tell you what I filled it with, because she’ll probably read this post. But I think it’s safe to tell that on 5th day she got dried chili (grown by us) and a recipe for a soup.

Sunny Sweet Potato Soup

1 onion (or piece of leek)
2-3 garlic cloves
1-2 mild chili peppers
2 tbsp oil
1 tsp thyme
200 g passata
1 l water
juice of 1 large orange and 1 tsp grated peel
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 bay leaf
1 sweet potato (400 g)
200 g frozen peas
salt and pepper

plain soy yogurt for serving (optional)

Chop or thinly slice the onion. Mince the garlic cloves and chili peppers. Heat the oil in a pot and sauté the onion and thyme couple of minutes. Add garlic and chili and continue sautéing until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the passata, water, orange juice & peel, cinnamon and bay leaf. Bring to boil and add peeled and diced sweet potato. Simmer until the sweet potato is soft, add the peas in the end of simmering. Season with salt and pepper and remove the bay leaf. Serve with or without a spoonful of plain soy yogurt.

Mushroom Salad

For a long time mushrooms were eaten only in eastern Finland. In the western parts people thought they were cow food. Nowadays mushroom eating has spread all over Finland, and mushroom salad made of salted milk-caps is often served as a side dish on Yule dinner. Mushroom salad is awesome, we had it yesterday with roasted root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets and rutabaga).

Finnish Mushroom Salad

5 dl salted milk-caps
water
1 (red) onion
pinch of white pepper
3-4 tbsp plain soy yogurt

Soak the milk-caps in plenty of water until they don’t taste too salty and drain. Soaking may take an hour or several hours depending on how salty your mushrooms are. Change the water once or twice during the soaking. You can also boil the mushrooms for couple of minutes to remove salt quicker. Chop the mushrooms and onion. Combine all the ingredients in a salad bowl and preferably refrigerate 15 minutes or longer before serving.

Mushroom Filled Crepes

Weather is getting colder and forest mushroom season is almost over. Yesterday I went to forest after work and found some sheep polypores, and few other mushrooms. Not much, but enough for a dinner.

American style thick pancakes are not usually eaten here in Finland. We prefer thinner ones, and they can be savoury or sweet. Savoury ones with spinach or carrot are usually little thicker than sweet crepes. I made some carrot crepes and used the mushrooms for the filling. We also had vinegar cucumbers on the side. The crepe recipe makes about 12 crepes, but the filling wasn’t enough for all of them. We ate last two or three with lingonberries.

Carrot Crepes

1 l soy milk
3 dl wheat flour
3 dl barley flour (or use 6 dl wheat flour)
3 big carrots
salt
2 tbsp oil
margarine for frying

Whisk the milk, flours and salt together and let sit 10-30 minutes. Meanwhile peel the carrots and grate them finely. Mix everything, melt some margarine in a frying pan and fry as thin crepes as you can. 

Mushroom and Broccoli Filling

1 l forest mushrooms (or about 250 g button mushrooms)
2 tbsp oil
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
florets of 1 broccoli or 1 whole small broccoli
2 dl soy yogurt
salt
white pepper
lemon juice
basil
parsley

Sauté the mushrooms in a dry pan until the water comes out of them. Discard the water or fry until evaporated. Chop the onion, garlic and broccoli. Add oil and chopped vegetables to the pan when there’s no more water in it. Simmer until onions and broccoli are soft, stir occasionally. Add yogurt and season with salt, pepper, lemon juice and herbs. Heat thoroughly. Put some filling on each crepe and roll.

VeganMoFo 2011 Pizza Post

We’ve posted about pizza in previous Mofos, so I guess we have to do it this year too. The filling is a little different than usual pizza filling and I strongly recommend trying it. I think other mushrooms would be good too, if chanterelles aren’t available.

Chanterelle Pizza

1 round pizza crust

1 l chanterelles
1 tbsp oil
1,5 dl tomato sauce
1,5 dl plain soy yogurt
0,5 tsp oregano
1-2 tbsp fresh parsley
(salt, pepper)

Put the chanterelles on a dry pan and sauté until the water comes out of them. Discard the water or continue sautéing until it’s evaporated. Add the oil and fry few minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix and spread on the pizza. Bake and enjoy.

Yugoslavian Movie Night

We watch quite a lot of movies. Especially non-Hollywood and non-English movies. Pretentious art-hipsterism or not, it’s a wonderful excuse for combining food culture and media culture.

Our movie of choice this time was Srđan Dragojević’s excellent and controversial “Lepa sela lepo gore” (“Pretty village, pretty flame”) which was accompanied by some Yugoslavian (Slovenian) delicacies. Hold your horses! We’re very aware the movie is essentially Serbian and the food cultures do vary in the melting-pot of former Yugoslavia, but we found Slovenian vegetarian recipes and decided that it’s close enough.

We had two kinds of salads, mini quiches, beer and Blair’s habanero chips.

Slovenian Cucumber Salad

5 medium/large potatoes + water for boiling
1 kg cucumbers (3 long)
3,5 dl soy yogurt
3-4 big garlic cloves
salt
pepper

Peel the potatoes, cut them half and slice. Boil them, drain and allow to cool. Coarsely grate the cucumbers, mix with salt and drain in a colander for a while. Mince the garlic and mix everything in a bowl. Let sit in the fridge for couple of hours before serving.

The original recipe didn’t say how much garlic would be good. I used 2 big cloves, but I think the salad could have been more garlicy, so I wrote 3-4 cloves.

Lentil Salad

1,5 dl green lentils + water for boiling
1 small red bell pepper
1 shallot
3 tbsp red vine vinegar
3 tbsp oil
salt
pepper

Boil the lentils about 30 minutes or until soft but not mushy. Chop the shallot and dice the bell pepper. Mix together and season with vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. Let sit in the fridge couple of hours before serving.

The recipe for the zucchini quiches is in its own blog entry.

Plutonium Cake

Nuclear plant exploded in Japan, so we made a plutonium cake. We used 2 tbsp agar agar flakes in the green layer, but it wasn’t enough, so the amount is increased in the recipe.

200g Digestive or other biscuits
85g margarine

1 can soy whipping cream (SoyaToo!)
5 dl vanilla flavoured soy yogurt
3 tsp vanilla sugar
4 canned peach halves
green food colour or yellow and blue food colour
juice of 1 lemon
1,5 dl liquid from the peach can
3-4 tbsp agar agar flakes

3 dl orange juice
2 tsp agar agar flakes

Put the Digestives in a plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin. Melt the margarine and combine with Digestive crumbs. Cover the bottom of a springform pan with parchment paper and spread the Digestive-margarine-mixture on it. Refrigerate about half an hour.

Mix lemon juice, peach can liquid and agar agar in a pot and boil 10-15 minutes. Whip the cream, puree the peach halves and combine with yogurt and vanilla sugar. Dye green. Allow the agar agar mixture to cool for couple or minutes and add to the green mixture. Pour on the digestive crust and refrigerate for few hours.

Mix orange juice and agar agar in a pot and boil 10-15 minutes. Pour on top of the cake and refrigerate couple of hours.