Finnish forest berry delights

Ha, I got my iPad battery re-charged at my mum's cousin's place which is only a short 10 minute row from our summer house. So I can keep on writing about my obsession with the fruits of the autumnal Finnish forest. Like I wrote earlier, the forest is currently bursting to the brim with berries and mushrooms. It makes you go totally crazy, you just don't want to leave all those lovely (and free!) berries out there. However there are blueberries and lingonberries in pretty much endless amounts, so at some point you just have to admit defeat and leave some of them out there in the forest. I'm sure all of us at he summer house have had more than our daily dose of all possible vitamins.

Yesterday me and sis headed out, braving the ticks, horseflies and mosquitoes (all of which are way too abundant out there in the forest if I might add) to pick blueberries and lingonberries. This summer has been quite humid which has helped produce an extra good berry yield this year. Blueberry season is already towards it's end, but there is still more than plenty of the purple tiny pearls out there. And these are nothing like the huge water-filled (and watery-tasting) berries you can buy in stores. These are tiny little dark purple berries which are loaded with taste and all sorts of things that are good for you, like vitamins and anti-oxidants. Blueberries are basically superfood, they are so good for you. And I'm sure, baking them in a delicious crust with sugar and butter will just enhance the health benefits!

Lingonberry season is not quite at its peak yet, there is plenty of berries out there but most of them are still a bit white on the underside and they have not quite reached their mouth puckering sourness yet. But I'm only here for a few days, so to cook lingonberry pie, I had to live with the fact that the berries were not quite optimal yet. However, as there were so much berries out there, I tried to pick the ripest and reddest ones, as lingonberries is one of those things you just can't get your hands on in the UK so I rationalised that even slightly under-ripe lingonberries are better than no lingonberries at all.

In my last post I touched on the "limitations" of cookin at the summer house. Not only is there no electricity, everything has to be cooked on wood heated stoves or the barbeque, but also there is (at least for all practical purposes) no oven at all. Well, it's not like this would stop me. First I was thinking of cooking something along the lines of a skillet cookie with berries, I have seen several recipes on Pinterest. But one thing we do have is a fish/meat smoking box. So me and my mum thought if it gets hot enough to cook meat, it would probably get hot enough to cook a pie as well. At least it was worth a try, it's not like berry pie would contain anything that would be dangerous to eat if it didn't cook properly through. The worst case would be a gooey berry mess. So we tried to bake a blueberry pie. Which turned out great. So I cooked a lingonberry-quark pie as well. And a mixed berry pie. I even had a stab at a savoury pie, I made one for my sis and her friends to take along on their four day hike in Northern Finland. It was filled with lamb and ham, tomatoes and carrots and topped with loads of cheese. Even that turned out quite delish looking, at least in my humble opinion. I'm waiting to hear a report back qbout the taste.

The fish smoking contraption. Basically, it's a

box you put on the wood burning stove. It heats

up like a mini oven. If you put smoking chips on the

bottom you get smoked meat or fish.

The savoury pie baked in the smoking box. I used

slices of red pepper to mark the edges of different

fillings so that everyone can get their favourite.

When you do summer house cooking, you are not allowed to use any recipes. Or scales or measuring jugs. It should all be done by instinct, touch and feel. That's part of the charm, you never knowif it will work, not to mention you won't ever be able to replicate any successfull efforts. So there is absolutely no guarantee the recipes below will work. However, if you think you actually want to get things right (thereby taking all the excitement out of cooking) you can always just use your favourite pie crust recipe instead of the one below. And use any berries you happen to have. And if you can't get quark, replace it with creme Fraiche, yoghurt or cream cheese. I'm pretty sure they will all work. If you can't get potato starch, use corn starch. And if you happen not to have a wood burning oven with a box for smoking (how could that be?!?!?), use a regular oven. So basically, the point is you want a crust, berries, possibly some dairy for the filling and some contraption to cook it in. This is what I love about cooking, you can just change things around as you wish, and 8 times out of 10 it will work out rather good, and at least 9 if not 10 times out of 10 it will be edible anyways. Particularly if enjoyed outside while watching the sun set over the lake.

Some sort of berry pie-like thing in a smoking box aka summer house cooking:

For the crust

50ish g butter

1 cup-ish AP flour (or whatever flour you happen to have, I used part whole wheat) + possibly some (1/2 cup-ish) extra flour depending on the consistency of the dough

1/2 cup-ish sugar

1/2 pack vanilla quark (100g)

Filling 1

2 cups-ish berries, freshly picked from your own forest (blueberries and/or raspberries)

2 tbsp potato starch

2 tbsp caster sugar

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

Filling 2

2 cups-ish fresh berries (I would suggest lingonberries as they go really well with the sweetness of the berry flavoured quark)

1 can (200g) berry flavoured quark

1 tbsp potato starch

1 egg

1 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

Flavoured Finnish quarks. Top left lemon,

top right white chocolate and lime, bottom

left vanilla, bottom right blueberry-raspberry

The how-to:

Go out in the forest to pick the berries, and clean away dirt and leaves. Chop the wood for your wood burning oven, and light it in good time. Wash your fish-smoking box to get rid of as much of the fish smell as you can. When you have a nice fire going, prepare the crust. Let the butter soften a bit, add flour and sugars and using your fingers, mix until a crumbly consistency. Add the quark, mix and add flour until dough reaches a nice consistency where it is crumbly and easy to spread to the bottom and sides of a pie tin or whatever heat resistant bowl you happen to have. For filling 1, mix the sugars and starch with the berries and spread onto the pie. For filling 2, mix everything with a fork except the berries. Place berries on the crust and add quark topping to evenly cover the berries. Bake in smoking box until done (took about 90-120 mintes for me, depending on how much wood you keep on the fire at all times).

Pie in the smoking box at the start of baking.

The verdict:

It's clear that a fish-smoker is a very versatile cooking device. Not only can you smoke fish, you can cook delicious juicy meats (like the garlic butter marinated lamb my mum made the other day), but you can clearly use it to bake pies as well. Of course the problem is that controlling the temperature of the smoking box can only be done at the level of adding more or less wood onto the fire, so you have to accept that sometimes the pies come out with the crust a bit underdone, and other times it gets a bit well done, and sticks to your pie tin. Maybe our guests are just being very polite, but so far they have eaten every pie without too much complaints, so I think they have turned out acceptable. To be honest, I thought the one I would like the best was the lingonberry-quark one, but in fact it was the simple one with nothing but blueberries. However, it might alsobe because that one turned out to have the perfect level of cooking with the crust being firm and crisp without it being burned at all and coming out of the pie tin in beautiful slices. The lingonberry one got a bit too fond of sticking to the tin. The mixed berry one is going with my sis and her friends on the hike, so no verdict on that one yet.

Next time I'm coming here I'll make sure I have thought of some other, even more challenging things to cook as it turns out that after years of thinking cooking possibilities are rather limited, it turns out that with a bit of experimenting you can actually cook all sorts. Maybe next time I'll try souffles! Naah, just kidding. Ok, now I'm off to the forest to get another bucket full of berries, going to make berry quark for pudding. And there might be another berry recipe still coming up some other day, who knows!

 

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Syrniki - russian quark pancakes

I guess I should begin by apologising for another pancake post right after the last one. But then again, who wouldn't love pancakes? To celebrate the weekend, and to make up for calories lost to rather heavy cardio lately (because the tub of Ben&Jerry's I had yesterday didn't quite do it...), I wanted to make a mean weekend brunch. When it comes to cooking, and particularly weekend brunches, I definitely don't have a problem trying to think up things to cook. Quite the opposite, my problem is that there is only two possibilities for weekend brunch each week, which leaves me with an ever growing list of recipes I want to try out, or old favourites I want to revisit and maybe pimp a bit. 

Talking about long lists, I have to go off on a tangent here for just a second. If you haven't used Evernote, I want to take a few sentences to introduce you to the software that is currently the only thread of sanity keeping my crazy life together. Basically, it's a software that allows you to organize notes into notebooks, tag them with key words and attach documents and figures. It's fully searchable, you can use it online but there are also apps for the iPhone and iPad (and apparently for Android as well, Google tells me). And the best thing, it's free! Well, it's free to a certain amount of data a month, but for my use it's good enough. The only downside with free Evernote is that you need to have access to the internet to see your notes. I always keep forgetting this. For me that only makes it useful in the UK, as I tend to turn off roaming when I go abroad (oh, the joys of a scientist's salary, you can't even afford to go online... sigh). There are also other apps in the Evernote family such as the very imaginatively named Web Clipper which allows you to save webpages, draw (Skitch) or study more efficiently (Evernote Peek). There even seems to be an Evernote food app, which I only discovered now as I was browsing the Evernote webpage while writing this post. I'm not sure what the Evernote food app would have that would make it better than Evernote proper but I'll have a look at that later. What I love about Evernote is that I can make my notes wherever I am, online on my work computer or using the app on my phone. I have standard notes like grocery list, ideas for presents etc which I can update as soon as I remember that I need to buy something, or find a good idea for a present. Then I just pull out the appropriate note when I'm at the grocery store, or it's time for someone's birthday. I also keep a list of recipes I want to try. As soon as I come across a good recipe in a food blog or a magazine I clip it or take a picture of it and save it. Then I have a library of easily browsable and searchable favourite recipes when I plan next week's menu, with all the ingredients already listed so I can just copy and paste to my grocery list.

But this wasn't supposed to be about making notes, it was about that oh so lovely lazy weekend brunch. This time I chose to cook syrniki, russian quark pancakes out of two reasons. I have been craving them ever since I saw the recipe posted on one of my favourite food blogs, Kauhaa ja Rakkautta a few weeks ago, and because I had a tub of quark in my fridge which was about to go off. So this recipe is stolen from that blog, and the blogger actually has adapted it from the oh so glamorous Pirkka magazine. For the non-Finns (if anyone besides my mum and sis actually read this...), Pirkka is the monthly magazine of the K-food chain, one of the two largest grocery store chains in Finland. You get the magazine if you sign up for the K-food chain loyalty card. It's one of those silly magazines that mostly contain adverts for new products disguised as articles, but I always loved browsing it when it arrived. Even now, when I go back home to my mum's place, I love to read it. The foodaholic in me loves to read about new food products. Also, the recipes in the magazine are often very useful, the type of quick and easy everyday food recipes you need to spice up your food life, instead of always cooking those same old dishes. And again, I was off on a tangent, I seem to have a problem staying focused today.

Anyways, back to quark pancakes. Finnish cuisine is strongly influenced by our geographical neighbours, and from the Russian kitchen we have the influence of using a lot of dairy, particularly soured dairy. The selection of dairy products in Finnish supermarkets is (in my very unbiased opinion) superior to anywhere else in the world. There are so many different types of flavoured and unflavoured creams, soured creams (different types) and quarks. I don't understand why the Brits, who seem to love their cream, haven't discovered the joys of flavoured creams. Back home we have savoury ones, like cheese, pepper or my personal favourite goat's cheese and tomato as well as sweet ones. Just imagine topping your cupcakes with caramel or strawberry flavoured cream. There is also a huge selection of flavoured quarks, such as berry, white choc and lemon, lime and many others. And on top of all this, you get many of the varieties lactose free. The positive side of me being thousands of kilometers away from all those yummy dairy temptations is that it has been easy to reduce the amount of dairy in my diet, and I have to admit it has had some very positive effects on my health (this despite that I have the genetics to prove that I'm lactose tolerant). Anyways, the point of this rant was that growing up eating Finnish food, I am very used to having a lot of different dairy choices available. So, although I'm happy that there is (one brand) of quark available in my supermarket, at the same time it's very depressing seeing that one lonely quark sitting there among all the gazillions of cheddars. And it's a depressing, fat free variety. I would prefer to have one with a bit of fat in it, but even fat free quark is better than no quark. Ok, rant over, I guess everyone is now aware of my feelings about Finnish dairy.

So how about those syrniki, what on earth are they? The one and only official source for  information, Wikipedia, tells us "In Russian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian cuisines, syrniki (Russian: сы́рник[и]; Ukrainian: сирники;Belarusian: сырнікі) are fried quark pancakes, garnished with sour cream, jam, honey, or apple sauce." My mum used to make these quite often at some point, I think actually that might have somehow magically coincided with the time the recipe was published in the Pirkka magazine... This is one of those foods that I really liked, but didn't get around to ever making myself. You know how you just forget about some foods if you don't actively make them. Then, one fine day you stumble upon the recipe and just remember such a food actually exists, and start craving it like crazy. Hopefully this has inspired you to try syrniki, you should be able to find quark at least in bigger supermarkets. And syrniki can almost be thought of as health food (cough, cough...). Well, at least compared to normal pancakes is that they have more protein thanks to the quark, and less carbs as there is less flour than in normal pancakes. Talk about rationalising...

Syrniki (makes about 16 small pancakes):

250g quark

3 eggs

65g white flour

30g sugar (this makes rather sweet pancakes, decrease or leave out if you are not a fan of sweet things)

10g vanilla sugar (again, optional, or replace with a splash of vanilla extract, or some vanilla pod seeds if you happen to have enough money to have vanilla pods hanging around unused)

14g melted butter

The batter is pretty  stiff, so the pancakes will keep their shape while cooking.

The howto:

Mix all ingredients, and let the batter stand for at least 15 minutes. This is not absolutely necessary if you just can't wait for your pancakes, but it does improve the texture of the batter and makes it a bit easier to cook. A pancake pan is optimal for cooking, but the batter is rather thick, so you can make small pancakes on a large pan as they will keep their shape rather well. I use about a topped tablespoon of batter per pancake. The batter doesn't contain much flour, so it takes a bit of patience to cook. Just make sure to stick to medium heat, and make sure the pancakes are properly cooked (turning a bit dark on the underside, with small bubbles forming on top) before you flip them over. That way they will not break during the flipping. Serve with berries, jam, fruit and/or maple syrup. Maybe even Nutella, ice cream or whipped cream if you are feeling very decadent.

The pancakes are ready to be flipped when they are golden
brown on the underside, and bubbles form on top.

One serving (1/3 of the recipe, or about 5 pancakes) contains 326 kcal (13g fat, 28g carbs, 19g protein). This is using low fat quark, and allowing for 1 additional tbsp butter for cooking the pancakes.

The verdict:

I cannot imagine a pancake I wouldn't like, and these are absolutely yummy. I just wish I could eat the whole batch in one go! The consistency is very different from traditional pancakes, they are much softer and more spongy. I think they are actually best eaten after they have cooled a little, that brings out the flavour of the quark much better. If you happened to like quark after trying these little dreamy things, check out my previous post about a quick and easy quark berry dessert.