I wrote a bit about Finnish Christmas food with my potato casserole recipe. This oven baked carrot casserole (porkkanalaatikko) is another traditional Finnish Christmas side dish, that would usually be served with ham or turkey. I'm not quite sure why these oven baked casseroles have a reputation of being a lot of work to make, as actually they don't take that much effort. And the best thing is you can make them ahead of time and freeze them. Then all you have to do is defrost them for Christmas eve dinner and pop them in the oven as they only improve from re-heating. Alternatively, you can prepare the casserole but freeze it before baking, and then do the full baking after de-frosting on Christmas Eve (let the casserole de-frost over night in the fridge).
Oven baked carrot casserole (porkkanalaatikko):
2 dl (200 ml or 3/4 cups plus 2 tbsp) short grained rice or "pudding rice" (Finnish puuroriisi)
1/2 litre water
1 litre (full-fat) milk
1 kg carrots
2 eggs
2 tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg (or more to taste)
2 tbsp syrup* (or 1 tbsp sugar)
breadcrumbs and butter
*Finnish syrup is darker than golden syrup but lighter than treacle. I mix 1/3 treacle with 2/3 golden syrup to get something resembling Finnish syrup
The howto:
Bring 1/2 litre of water to a boil in a large saucepan. Add rice and cook until the water has absorbed. Add the milk, and cook until rice is cooked and a loose porridge forms (about 30-40 mins). Let cool.
Peel and chop carrots. Bring enough water to a boil in a saucepan to cover the carrots. Cook carrots until soft. Drain water and mash carrots (you can use a potato masher, ricer or handheld blender).
Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Mix the carrots with the rice porridge and add eggs, spices and syrup. Divide into two oven proof bowls and sprinkle generously with breadcrumbs and place small knobs of butter on top. Bake in the oven for 1 1/2 - 2 hours. The top should be golden, and the carrot bake should be bubbling. In my opinion, a longer baking time makes a more tasty casserole.
The verdict:
This is one of those dishes that just have to be on the Christmas table, or else Christmas is ruined. It's really tasty and although so many buy the casseroles ready-made from the store, I think the home-made variety is infinitely better. And it's not that much of a hassle really. I like to make it a day ahead, and then re-heat on the day. The only thing that really takes a bit of time is the carrot peeling, but unless you are making in double or triple serving (and you shouldn't need to unless you are having several dozen guests) this will be more than enough for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and possibly Boxing Day as well. And after that you don't want any more anyways, it's that extra bit delicious because you only get it once a year. However, this is a really cheap dish to make and it makes quite a few servings, so I don't see why you couldn't make it at other times of the year as well, as a thrifty side. Delicious with some ham, turkey or any other meat. I even makes a light lunch all by itself.
We have entered the magical month of December. It's cold, dark and miserable. But it's also an excuse to start thinking about Christmas food. One of the must have foods on the Finnish Christmas Dinner table are an assortment of oven baked vegetable dishes, called "laatikko" in Finnish. Basically laatikko is the Finnish word for a drawer or box, but it's also used for oven baked dishes. For Christmas you usually make "porkkanalaatikko" (oven baked carrot casserole), "lanttulaatikko" (oven baked swede casserole) and "perunalaatikko" (oven baked potato casserole). They are all relatively easy to make, but take a lot of time. First you need to peel the veg, cook them in water until soft and mash them, and then mix with the rest of the ingredients (usually bread crumbs, syrup, cream and butter) and bake very slowly in a low temperature oven for 2-3 hours to let the flavours really develop.
The potato casserole, perunalaatikko, takes even more time to prepare than the other two. It needs to be sweetened over night so it should be started the night before. It is also completely in the hands of the food gods to decide whether the sweetening is successful or not. It's a combination of using the right potatoes and having the right temperature for the sweetening process. But no worries, the sweetening process is an old cooking process used before sugar was available. It's a process where the starch in the food is enzymatically broken down to shorter chained carbohydrates, i.e. sugar. These days, you can achieve the same by adding syrup. But I love the tradition of making the casserole using the traditional way. And last year was finally the year when I had a successful sweetening process. I'm not exactly sure what the key to success was, I think it was the right potatoes combined with pure luck.
I nicked the recipe for the potato casserole from the Finnish cooking web site Kotikokki, but most recipes for the casserole are pretty similar. Make sure to pick a starchy, or floury, potato. If it says "good for mash" on the pack, you have pretty much got what you are looking for.
Finnish sweetened potato casserole:
2 kg floury potatoes
2 dl (200 ml, 3/4 cups plus one tbsp) plain flour
50 g butter
0.5-1 l milk (I like to use full fat, as it is Christmas after all...)
2 tbsp syrup (if sweetening is not successful)
salt to taste (start with about 2-3 tsp)
The howto:
Peel and chop potatoes. Cook in salted water until soft, pour off the water and mash potatoes. Let the mash cool until about 50 degrees C (feels warm but not hot), add half of the butter and half of the flour into the mash and mix well. Sprinkle the rest of the flour on top of the mash, put the lid back onto the saucepan and let sweeten in a warm place for at least 6 hours, or over night. The temperature should stay between 50 and 75 degrees C, but I wrapped my saucepan in a towel and left in the kitchen over night and the sweetening process worked well. The next morning you should find your mash softer than it was the night before, and with a sweeter flavour. The mash also changes colour to almost grey on top where the flour was. Give the mash a good mix, and add milk until soft (softer than normal mash, but not quite runny). If the sweetening has not been successful, also add the syrup for extra sweetness. Mix in salt to taste. Place in one big or two medium sized oven proof buttered bowls and dot the rest of the butter on top of the casserole. The casserole will bubble while cooking, so leave one and a half to two inches space in the bowls. Cook in 200 degrees for the first 30 minutes and then in 150 degrees for another two hours. The casserole will turn dark around the edges of the bowl. I love this crunchy bit, but you can just leave it uneaten if you find it unappetising. If the top gets too dark, you can cover the casserole with aluminium foil when baking.
The verdict:
I have had varying success with this dish through the years. Last Christmas it turned out perfect. The reason I like the traditional sweetening instead of taking the easy way out of just using syrup is that it tastes different, or maybe that's in my head but I think it's sweet but not too sweet. But each to their own. Year after year one of the subjects being discussed during the Christmas dinner is whether that year's potato casserole is as good as the one Mum/Grandma made and whether it's better or worse than the year before.
I'm not really much of a Christmas person. I tend to get a bit annoyed by Christmas songs playing everywhere from November onward, and I hate the idea of having to buy Christmas presents just for the sake of Christmas. And speaking of Christmas songs, how annoying is it they are all about that whole Jesus is born and blah blah blah. Seriously, can we get over that old bit of superstition please. People have enough reasons to kill each other without religion to add to all of that.
For the last few years I have pretty much ignored Christmas. I have outsourced Christmas shopping to my sister. I get her something she wants (I demand that she makes a wish-list), and she usually gets my mum's and dad's presents. And I have agreed with all my friends not to exchange Christmas presents. I can be persuaded to write a few Christmas cards, but that's pretty much it. If I had the money, I would fly away to the Bahamas and lie on the beach for all of Christmas. But that would break my mum's heart, so I won't. I will get on a over-full train to make my way down to an overcrowded Heathrow, stand in line for hours while sweating in my warmest winter coat, and then run like crazy to make my flight and sit next to sweaty, smelly people who like me have been stressing like crazy to make it onto the plane. And they call it a Holiday...
It's not that I have anything against Christmas per se. I just resent all the stress that comes with it. There has to be presents, even if no-one actually really needs anything, and you really can't afford any of that, but hey, if you don't buy loads of presents you don't really love your loved ones, right? And there has to be tons of food, to the point of it becoming a problem because there is so much to eat before it goes bad. And then you eat that damned Christmas food until New Year's because there just is too much of it. How about just getting away somewhere warm, lying on a beach, eating in a restaurant and actually spending time together with no presents and no left-over food and no stress? Maybe one day I get to do that. But until then, I will drag my heavy bag around from home to train, to another train, to the check-in desk and then again out from the next airport, all while sweating like crazy. What's not to love about that?
Obviously there are some good things about Christmas. Like not having to go to work for a whole two weeks! That is such a luxury. Unfortunately I do have a deadline for a book chapter coming up at the end of the year, but I'm doing my best to finish that before I fly home. I'm hatching an evil plan to not check my work email for the whole two weeks. That would be awesome. Right up to when I actually get back into work, and have to deal with two weeks of untouched emails. There are lots of crazy people in science who love their job so much that they work on all through Christmas, so I know there *will* be emails.
So that should be enough of a moan for this time, and now on to the actual recipe. Which is not really a recipe at all. It's about putting jelly on puff pastry. But this is a traditional Finnish pre-Christmas pudding, so obviously I had to blog about it. I guess it's the Finnish equivalent to mince pies. Recreating this outside of Finland is a bit of a challenge though, as you need the right type of jelly (in Finland we call it marmelade). It is made from prunes, and there is something magic about it because it doesn't mind being baked in the oven. I don't think you can get any baking proof jellies over here, but I might be mistaken. So if you happen to be in Finland, pick up a jar or two of this thingy, which pretty much looks like... well... hmm.... black goo? You can even buy it online!
Me and best friend made a UK version of these pastries a few years ago by mixing canned prunes with plum marmelade. This mixture is not baking proof, so instead of making the pastries look like the ones I have in the picture, you need to make them into hand pies, and make sure you use a fork to seal the pies really tight. That gives you the right flavour, if not the traditional look.
Other than the problem with the jelly/marmelade, these only take a second to make. They are nice to eat for dessert, or to enjoy with your afternoon coffee. Or for breakfast. Or in the evening with hot cocoa. Or mulled wine.
Christmas stars:
puff pastry (all butter ready rolled is my favourite)
prune jelly
1 egg
icing sugar
The howto:
Preheat oven to 200 degrees C. Roll out puff pastry to about 0.5 cm thickness if not using ready roll. Cut into squares, about 9x9 cm. Make cuts in every corner and turn every second corner to the centre to make a star shape. Use a fork to gently whip the egg and brush egg wash all over the pastries. Use two teaspoons to put a heaped teaspoon of marmelade into the centre of the stars. Bake for about 15-20 minutes, or until the puff pastry is golden. I prefer mine a bit underdone so that the pastry is still a bit gooey under the marmelade, but if you prefer your puff pastry flaky and dry, bake a bit longer. Dust with icing sugar right before serving.
The verdict:
This is a Finnish pre-Christmas classic. I just have to make them every year. Back home, frozen puff pastry is sold ready rolled into small rectangles, with four rectangles per pack. One rectangle makes two pastries, so I used to make a single woman's serving of two Christmas stars. This was super convenient, whereas in the UK, puff pastry is sold in huge blocks, so once you thaw it from frozen, you have to quite a big serving. I blame my weight gain on having too many of these pastries around. They are so addictive. They are best when still warm, but I have had no problem in disposing of leftover cold ones either. In fact, I would say the speed at which I am disposing of lefover ones, straight into my stomach, is much more of a problem. I think Christmastime is not Christmastime without these pastries!
I just read on Hufvudstadsbladet (the Swedish-Finnish daily newspaper) that the hottest food trend is porridge. Apparently, you can buy creme brûlée oatmeal in New York for $16, and there is a pub in Copenhagen called Grød which only serves porridge. You can find their menu here, and it looks lovely, if I ever happen to be in Copenhagen, I will definitely give them a try. What would you say about oatmeal with caramel sauce, roasted almonds and apple? Or barley porridge with flaxseed, apple, raisin and ginger syrup. And in the Christmas-time, they are obviously also serving rice porridge. I will certainly keep the porridge trend in mind next year, as there are so many wonderful porridges out there to make, and I love a nice steaming bowl of porridge for breakfast. I almost never have breakfast anywhere but home or at my workplace cafeteria, but when I'm travelling, I have a tradition of getting a serving of oatmeal with fruit compote from Eat at Heathrow airport. There is something very soothing about spooning oatmeal into your mouth while staring at the giant screens, waiting for the gate of your flight to be displayed.
Call it sticky rice or rice pudding, in Finland we call it rice porridge, and eat it for Christmas. Other times of the year it's oatmeal all the way, but on Christmas you celebrate by making your breakfast porridge from luxurious rice. Well, it was luxurious probably a hundred years ago or so... In Finland (and Scandinavia) rice porridge is served warm, and usually eaten for breakfast. For Christmas, an almond is added to the pot of porridge, and getting the almond means good luck for the next year. Christmas rice porridge is served with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top, and sometimes with a bit of butter as well.
For rice porridge you should use a round, short grained rice. In Finland it's sold under the name of Puuroriisi (porridge rice) and it's similar to pudding rice. Also risotto rice works quite well. What you want is a rice with high starch content, which will make a creamy porridge.
In my family, rice porridge is our traditional Christmas brunch, usually eaten before the Christmas sauna. I actually sometimes cheat and make rice porridge other times of the year as well, because it's really tasty. It's nice to have for dinner on a cold winter's day, or even for breakfast in the middle of summer while thinking about the fact that it's only half a year left until Christmas. Although rice porridge is traditionally served with cinnamon and sugar, this time I decided to pimp it up with some Christmas-y apple syrup with pecans and raisins. The recipe for the syrup for the pecans is stolen from Completely Delicious.
Rice porridge (serves 4):
200 ml (3/4 cups plus 1.5 tbsp) rice
200 ml (3/4 cups plus 1.5 tbsp) water
1 liter milk (the more fat in the milk, the tastier the porridge...)
1/2 tsp salt
(1 almond)
For the candied pecans:
200 ml apple juice
100 g light muscovado sugar
cinnamon stick
4 whole cloves
1 tbsp (or a bit more...) whiskey
20 pecan nuts
1/4 cup raisins
The howto:
For the candied pecans, cook juice, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and whiskey until a heavy syrup forms (about 30 minutes). Add the pecans and raisins, take the saucepan off the heat and let cool. Store in a glass container.
For the porridge, heat water until boiling. Add the rice, and let cook until the rice has absorbed the water. Add milk and cook on a low heat until the milk has been absorbed (about 40 minutes). Just remember, no matter how big a saucepan you use, the milk will boil over, you will just have to accept that, and clean up the mess...
The verdict:
First of all, every time I have rice porridge, I am amazed at how rice and milk can taste so extremely good. And this is one of the most Christmas-y flavours I can imagine. At the same time, this was a bit different to me, as I'm used to having rice porridge very simply with cinnamon and sugar. However, I absolutely loved the syrup. I don't think I have ever made syrup, but it turned out to be really easy. Just let the mixture slowly boil away, and it will turn to syrup. There is no way you can mess that up. And the super sweet syrup tastes very Christmas-y of apple. It is one of those food epiphanies where you just make something really simple, and it turns out to be so amazingly delicious that you have to taste it over and over again until you have spooned half of the syrup into your mouth before being able to serve it to anyone. Not sure if that correctly illustrates how much I loved the syrup. To summarise, I effin' loved it!!!! I would love to bathe in the stuff. And eat it with pretty much anything. Pancakes. French toast. Any sort of toast. On crackers. Using a spoon right out of the jar. Sip it through a straw. Lick it off the floor. Just a few ideas...
When I was a child, my mum kept all her recipes in a small black binder. They were hand written on checkered paper, or clippings from magazines and journals. That black binder probably existed in our house for at least 20 years. One of the recipes in that binder was our family's traditional gingerbread recipe. I remember how we baked gingerbread every Christmas. My mum would make the dough in a big red bucket. Ok, I probably don't remember the red bucket, I must have seen it in a photo. Anyways, I remember my mum making a really big batch of gingerbread dough, and taking it down to the cellar to rest over night.
We made a gingerbread house every year. We even had a traditional design for the house and used the same grease-stained cardboard cutout pattern year after year. We had an old cast iron skillet we used to make the caramel to glue the house together. It used to be my dad's job to assemble the house. And we then made a winter wonderland in our open fireplace, with elfs and candles, and the gingerbread house as a centrepiece (and I had to look up the plural of elf on google... how embarrassing!). There was one more Christmas tradition that related to the gingerbread house. It wasn't supposed to be eaten until the official end of Christmas, which in Finland is 20 days after Christmas, on January 13th. But when we got around to eating it, the whole back side of the house had already been eaten away piece by piece, and all the candy decorations had been picked off the house, one by one. Sometimes pieces of candy were glued on using so much sugar icing that a piece of the house would break off when you tried to peel off the piece of candy.
I used to make a lot of gingerbread houses back when I was still living in Finland. Well, they were more like cottages than elegant mansions, but it was one of my Christmas traditions. Back home you could buy frozen gingerbread dough. So I never bothered to make it myself. It was great for making houses, as you need a really good dough that is easy to roll and bakes evenly. And it was really tasty too. Below are some old pictures of a few gingerbread houses from Christmases past. Sorry about the crappy quality of the photos as they were never meant to be displayed in public.
This year I was looking at amazing gingerbread house pictures online, and got a sudden craving for making traditional Finnish gingerbread. So I called my mum, and asked her if she still had the traditional gingerbread recipe. Well, shock and horror, she didn't!! So I was heartbroken, thinking I would never again taste the traditional gingerbread of my childhood. But surprise, when I was complaining about it to my sister, she said that she had copied the recipe from the black binder. So in the end, I got the one and only right gingerbread recipe.
I brought a bag of gingerbread spice with me from Finland, thinking it should contain everything I needed for the recipe. However, when I had a closer look at it, it turns out it only had cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and cloves. My traditional gingerbread also contains dried bitter orange peel (Seville orange peel). That seems to be a spice completely unknown to the UK, and hard to find online, so I just had to admit defeat and leave it out this time. Another problem I encountered was that the only syrup you can get in British supermarkets is golden syrup. The Finnish syrup is much darker, so I bought golden syrup and treacle, and made my own mix. Despite these slight problems, the gingerbread turned out great. And as usual, not quite 100% of the dough made it to the next day, I had to do some quality control every now and then to assure that the flavours were developing properly while the dough was resting.
My family's traditional gingerbread (makes a lot):
250 g butter
200 g sugar
150 ml syrup (I used 1 tbsp treacle and the rest golden syrup)
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ginger
2 tsp bitter orange peel (if you can find any)
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
about 900 ml (3 2/3 cups) plain flour
The howto:
Put the butter, sugar, syrup and spices in a pan and heat until the butter and sugar has melted to forma a smooth mixture (don't boil). Let cool for 5-10 minutes, until no longer hot. Keep stirring every now and then. Meanwhile, mix salt, soda and flour in another bowl. Add eggs to the butter and spice mixture. Sift the dry ingredients into the butter, syrup and egg mixture. Mix until combined. Let the dough rest in the fridge over night (or two nights if it turns out you end up going for drinks the night you were meant to bake your gingerbread).
The next day, pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C. Roll out the dough thinly, and use cookie cutters to make patterns. Add some flour onto your working surface if the dough sticks. I like to roll out the dough directly on the parchment paper, so you don't have to move the cookies around, as that tends to distort them, especially if you roll your dough really thin so that it will bake really crispy. Bake for about 5 minutes. The gingerbread will still be soft when you take it out of the oven but will go crispy when it cools off. Make icing in all the colours of the rainbow, and get a lot of colourful candy and sprinkles for decorating the gingerbread. Make yourself a cup (or two, or three...) of mulled wine, and watch the quality of the decorations become better for every mug of mulled wine.
The verdict:
The gingerbread turned out pretty damn good despite the lack of bitter orange peel and the syrup approximation. It made the apartment smell like Christmas, and gave me that traditional pinch in my stomach you get after eating too much cookie dough. Me and best friend got together to have a pre-Christmas gossip and baking evening. We made Glögg (Finnish mulled wine, which by the way is much better than the UK one...), baked Finnish prune jelly puff Christmas pastries (coming soon), listened to Christmas songs on Spotify and baked and decorated gingerbread. I finally got to try out a good fraction of my selection of almost 50 cookie cutters. Hence a few less than Christmas-y gingerbreads, but I think Xmas dinosaurs could be the next big thing!
