Finland by the Suitcase
by Anna Roth photos by Lara Ferroni
Karoliina Kuisma is watching my first encounter with Finnish candy with amusement.
“You can spit it out if you want,” she offers, but I am determined to finish.
She smiles, a little mischievously. The salmiakki is sour
and salty and tastes like the most intense licorice ever. The flavor’s not
really unpleasant until I get to the center, where a cache of powder completely
overwhelms my taste buds. I’m all for trying new sweets, but my brain is having
a hard time categorizing this with butterscotch disks and Jolly Ranchers.
“Sometimes I buy the powder and just stick my finger in,”
she says, then tells me that I tried the least intense type (other varieties
from this brand, Tyrkisk Peber, include Hot & Sour and Bonfire). I probably
should have listened when she told me that Finns don’t have much of a sweet
tooth.
This is my first foray into the world of Finnish cuisine,
and it’s already proving to be an eye-opener. Next, possibly as a reward for
braving the salmiakki, Karoliina has promised to teach me how to make pulla, a
traditional Finnish dessert bread, in her kitchen in North Seattle.
Karoliina moved from Helsinki to Seattle three years ago
to be a Visiting Lecturer of Finnish at the University of Washington.
“When you’re away from home, things that represent home
become more important to you,” she says, and in her case, it was the food. She
wasn’t particularly interested in Finnish cuisine when she lived there
(apparently, the concept of pasta as an easy dinner is universal), but has
since started making traditional recipes and integrates Finnish cuisine into
her lectures frequently. One of her students’ favorite things to make is pulla.
The key to pulla is the cardamom—Finns don’t use the fine
powder that’s common here, but choose from different grades of ground seeds
depending on what they’re making. (The coarser grinds are generally used to
impart flavor for baking; the finer grinds are used for cooking. In either
case, look for whole pods of white cardamom or whole seeds, which you can grind
at home.) The resulting dough is yeast-based, flecked with cardamom, sweetened
with vanilla sugar (granulated sugar with bits of vanilla bean thrown in) and
is light and airy. The dough is only the base; from here, there are countless
variations on pulla.
Today we are making simple filled buns.
Karoliina expertly kneads the dough a few times and then
starts to form rolls. She indents each with a drinking glass and puts a dollop
of a quark-based mixture on top of each. Quark, a soft, mild yogurt-cheese with
the texture of sour cream, is used frequently in Finnish cooking but is also
catching on stateside as a substitute for ricotta. I was surprised to see the
brand she used was local, from Appel Farms in Ferndale—it’s available at the
bigger QFCs, farmers’ markets and gourmet stores like Whole Foods and PCC.
In two, she substitutes a mixture of blueberries, sugar
and potato starch for the quark to showcase another traditional preparation. The
rolls all now look like bready Danishes. She adds a few previously frozen
blueberries from Carnation Farms to the top of each with a flourish (though she
holds one up, suspiciously.
“This is the size of a grape in my eyes,” she says,
worrying that it will explode in the oven). She then brushes the top with an
egg mixture and puts it in to bake.
As the pulla is baking, Karoliina and I flip through a
Finnish cookbook and she shows me recipes for all the different ways that you
can use the dough: braided, rolled into cinnamon rolls, molded into elaborate
holiday breads with names like Bishop’s Wig and Sister’s Nose. You can layer it
with whipped cream, jam or marzipan. At Christmas, you can color it with
saffron and add raisins to it.
We also come across images of other Finnish meals, like
carrot and rutabaga casserole, beet salad and macaroni casserole made with
hamburger meat, onions and noodles. Karoliina explains that the climate of the
Northwest is very similar to Finland’s—though, obviously, we’re warmer in the
winter—and many of the seasonal fruits and vegetables, like blueberries and
rhubarb, are the same. She tells me that a favorite pastime of Finns is berry
picking, because of laws that make it legal to pick everywhere. They pick
blueberries, lingonberries, currants and cloudberries, which grow in marshes
and look like salmonberries.
Karoliina defrosts a slice of the dark rye bread she
brings back from Finland “by the suitcase” and spreads cloudberry jam on it.
I’ve never tried it, but there’s a familiar sweetness to it, almost like
apricot. There’s a crunch to it as well from the seeds, which are about the
size of a grape seed.
I ask about Finnish activities in Seattle, and Karoliina
tells me that there’s a very active community, usually eclipsed by the larger
groups of Norwegians and Swedes. She’s very involved with the Finlandia
Foundation, which organizes movie showings on the fourth Wednesday of every
mouth at the Swedish Cultural Center in Ballard. There are folk dancing groups,
a chorus and a Finnish Lutheran Church. The Nordic Heritage museum often hosts
concerts. Finns have been in the Northwest since the turn of the 20th
century—they came to work in the forest industry and many settled on the
peninsula, in places like Aberdeen and Astoria, but many came to the city.
Soon, the pulla is ready, and all conversation comes to a
halt when it’s taken out of the oven. It smells delicious, fragrant with
cardamom, and though some of the berries did explode, it looks fantastic. We
eat the rolls accompanied by a big glass of milk—Karoliina’s insistence on a
Finnish tradition. They are chewy, not particularly sweet but extremely
flavorful because of the cardamom—which is perfectly complemented by the
blueberries and the quark.
It’s a rainy, grey, Seattle kind of day outside, but the
warm buns are a perfect antidote; I can understand how they might help one get
through a cold, dark winter. I might hesitate before trying salmiakki again,
but pulla transcends cultures to become a classic.
For our recipe for pulla, click over to our recipe page.
For whole seeds and pods of cardamom: World Spice
For vanilla sugar, salmiakki:Scandinavian Specialties
For rye bread and Karoliina-approved licorice:
Continental Store
5014 Roosevelt Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105
206.523.0606
Anna Roth is a Seattle-based writer and editor, who focuses primarily on food writing and personal essays.