funding for BOJ kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund a fragrant braided cardamom copy bread called boola baraka a rice field by crusted pastry and Paiste a never-fail savory hot pot from Corellia a delicious tour of Finland served up with lessons learned from a lifetime of food travel and writing I'm Bo Joe kangas cookbook author food writer columnist wife mother and grandmother I've spent my life learning about food and sharing my knowledge with others it's given me a certain perspective on cooking rooted in the flavors traditions and rhythms of life in northern Minnesota and a passion for sharing what I know welcome to my kitchen dick decided he wanted to he apply for a Fulbright to study the rocks to study geology in Finland and so he he applied for the Fulbright and he got a student Fulbright and we had two little kids we went over on the MS Coons home which was a Swedish ship from New York to Stockholm and Greg had his first birthday on the boat going over and he had his second one on the boat coming back so that gives you an idea how old they were and Cathy was three we didn't have much money so we ended up staying in a third floor apartment of a retired nurses village no elevators so I was dragging two little kids up the steps and down the steps with pails of milk and and all the food that we had to use for you know for us and we were in part of Helsinki called capella the Days Inn and I wasn't prepared for this the days got shorter and shorter in the fall soon it was like 3:00 in the afternoon it was perfectly dark outside and I was just feeling ah I didn't know what was wrong with me I was tired I felt depressed I suppose now they give me a pill but at that time I thought I've got to do something you know I can't keep going like this so I called the United States information service and I talked to a woman whose name was miscellaneous I thought that was such a remember the name because to me it was miscellaneous and I said you know I can do something I can speak Finnish I can do demonstrations and food I'd done that for a long time and it would be fun to learn about Finnish foods and I I would go and I would talk to people to the Martha League they called it Martha Leto and ask them about the foods that they made I'd ask them what they you know how did their day go when you get up in the morning what what do you eat and at what time to eat lunch and and so I had a chance to really kind of study the eating patterns of Finns they always serve coffee in the afternoon coffee table was an important thing to prepare that if you have a people that I come to visit you serve coffee rarely do you invite someone over for a meal it was always for coffee and the coffee table I learned had to have seven items on it the first item is Pola or they you know a the cardamom flavored bread and it sort of built around the pattern of the bula and a nice cake and a fancy cake and then in between you had a variety of cookies so that you could have a variety of seven different items on the coffee table we begin our celebration of Finnish cuisine with a traditional coffee table and our favorite classic cardamom coffee bread bula so we start with a half a cup of warm water between 105 and 115 degrees and then we're going to add approximately two packages of active dry yeast and each package of active dry yeast is a actually just a scant tablespoon so we're going to mix that up you can see that there and let it dissolve and it will if we take a pinch of the sugar put that in from it we use a cup of sugar all together and we'll let it sit for about five minutes well it begins to foam you can see already it's starting to foam I'm going to add some heated and cooled milk to the mix and then we'll add the kind of them a nice amount of cardamom and a teaspoon of salt well that's about a third of a tablespoon there we go and then we'll add all of the sugar and stir that all up next thing we're gonna do is add four eggs everything that you put into a yeast mixture should be at room temperature so that the batter will the dough arise better okay people often ask how do you how do you measure your flour and that's what I do I scoop and sweep this will take about six to seven cups of flour all-purpose flour if you're using bread flour you'll use a little bit less but I like to use all-purpose flour because it makes a softer dough okay and one thing we do with with the full adult is I'll add about half of the flour in the traditional way you would get a nicer texture of bread if you add half the flour first and then add your butter so here we go we're going to and this is soft butter it can be soft or melted and we'll mix that in but you'll notice right away the invader gets more glossy looking which is really nice and then you end that end up with it that really nice texture that you have in the Pula it's the same method that's used for making brioche now I'm gonna add in two more cups of flour scoop and sweep and I'll stir that in so now we have 5 cups added so another 2 cups are so is about all we're going to need and again one more cup that will be 6 cups of flour while other kind of slowly then I'll go ahead and and put this on to the standing mixer with the dough hook in place it might take a little bit more or a little bit less flour sometimes you it's so much easier to tell whether the dough is ready to be put to rise if you touch it by hand do it by hand so I'm going to turn this out onto a floured board and finish it up pull it over onto itself like so and you just keep pulling the dough over onto itself until you can handle it well and we go like this and this dough is beginning to feel really good nice and smooth now I'm gonna Pat it with a little bit of flour and we'll put it into the bowl so that it can rise until it's doubled turn it over to grease the top turn it over again here we are now we can unwrap it and turn it out onto the counter now I like to spray the counter with a little bit of oil that way it can be sure that it's not gonna be sticky and then we do our shaping first of all I'm going to divide the dough into three parts and each one of these will make one braid we'll take the dough and shape it into a long strand about oh I suppose it's about 20 inches long and then and then we braid and they call this plating plai T top tip it over and then here we are with our dough risen it takes about a half an hour or so you don't want to over prove it because then they get too flat and we're going to I took an egg and beat it up with a little bit of sugar and we'll just brush the braids lightly you don't want to actually barn - -is-- them you just want to brush them so that they're glossy and this egg wash or the egg glaze will actually help to hold the the nuts on top and that's sliced on a slice of almonds and then I like to also add pearl sugar and this pearl sugar is a it's imported from Sweden but they use the very same one in Finland as well so the pearl sugar will just sprinkle on top okay these go into the oven they'll bake for like I said about 18 to 20 minutes at 325 if you're baking in a regular oven or at about 300 if you're baking in a connection of it I love bula some friends like to put butter on the table I like it just the way it is but you can go either way sometimes I'll take some soft butter and whip it up with with some amaretto or a little bit of powdered sugar and and I give it an extra flavor and that's that's kind of fun to serve especially if you've got a open house and you want to arrange the boba nicely and like people spread the butter themselves they told us about a lot of things about what happened during the Finnish and Russian war it because it was pretty recent in their memory at the time I some rather amazing things to me where the fact that all these karelians were displaced from their own part of the country and they were absorbed into the families in the rest of the country they didn't have you know camps that they went to a displacement camps of any kind and they didn't even have it was it was all volunteer on the part of the people that lived there and they took in total strangers families that they didn't know anything about and they said it they told them that they should make themselves at home that they really felt bad that there that they were displaced from their own homes and they didn't think they'd ever be able to go back so there was money that was collected to help replace a home homes for the trillions and I remember looking at my tellingly of death he looking at my wedding rings and she said hmm I had wedding rings once but I donated them to the Karelian cause we're making the dough for a Karelian be Turki and Apodaca is a pie and it's a ripe crusted rice filled pie that is very traditional in Finland when we lived in Finland many years ago it was a very traditional thing in one area of the country and now when we go back it's everywhere because they picked up what is a very classic item and everyone makes it at first at first every meal every buffet we went to they served the karelian pitaka and it can be filled with either cooked rice or with mashed potatoes put about a cup full of water warm water and that's just an estimate I mean you have together you have to give an amount and we're going to do half rye flour whoops and half white fork white flour so I'm going to do right flour which in this case is the chorus rye and we're going to just add that to the water and about a half a cup more then we're going to add white flour to it the reason we're doing the white flour and the rye flour mixture is because the white flour has more gluten in it and it's a little bit easier to handle when you start rolling out the dough now this looks like it's not going to turn into anything doesn't it but actually we're going to work on it and we're gonna make it work but take this this sort of scrappy looking dull and pull it together like soul and I'll take it take it out and put some flour on the board and give it a need and I'll see there's nothing but water and salt right Lauer and some white flour here and the classic way I got I was taught how to do this by a group of women who were home economists at the flour company in Helsinki shape the dough into a strand like this then divided off into portions and I'll try to make about a dozen portions here cut each one you've got it the quarters and then cut each quarter into thirds thirds again okay then the next thing you do is make this into a little make them into little balls and these will dry out pretty quickly so you should once you get going on them you're gonna have to roll out your dough and and just get busy and do it and flatten it out now there's a special rolling pin that we use and this one is you notice it has it sort of thicker in the middle and thinner on the edges and the reason it's that way is because it will actually they were originally just carved out by the men in the house you roll the dough so that it begins to you can use a regular rolling pin but this is kind of fun to use so that the dough will spin and I'm not that good at it but I can do it and what's fun is that they told me that they can tell what village you lived in by the shape of your beater cut and the beater cause usually is a classic of the eastern part of England which is Karelia now the way that you shape the pea Turki and this is this is really kind of fun you take a little bit of the filling and the filling is just basically rice cooked in milk and a lot of people just take their rice pudding they will they quite often will cook the rice overnight in the oven just put rice and milk and a little bit of salt into it okay now to get the shape we start shaping like so and that is the shape of the Korean burrata okay I've got a mixture of AB hot milk and butter and we brush them on the edges like so and then they go into a really hot oven a 425-degree oven and they bake rather quickly we base them once while they're baking the end these go into the oven at 450 degrees for approximately 10 minutes what they do in Finland is they like to have the the P Terk of the kind of soft and what they'll do is wrap it in in a towel until the whole thing was softened we kind of like them crisp for ourselves but we'll let these cool and then I'll put them in a basket a special basket that's used in craley and an eastern part of Finland and then we serve it with an egg butter it's really classic favorite thing when we left Finland dick wanted to go he had gotten his master's degree in in University of Missouri and he went he wanted to go to get his PhD at Stanford but we're driving into Stanford Village it was in that Menlo Park we drove past a place called Sunset magazine I saw this my heart oh I've got to work there I've just got to go to work at sunset and so I I did apply there and got a job as a typist they didn't have a spot in the in the food department for me but except to be a typist which was great because that was I thought that was perfect I was like learning on the job how to write and what kind of things are how to write recipes and how what kind of things were interesting to write articles about and how you wrote an article and how you how you put this all together it would took me about three months from typing and I learned how to write and then there was an opening in the food department of course I was able to get right in there and and start doing editorial work was most exciting I ended up even doing pictures you know food styling for the cover of the magazine which was just exciting and Sunset magazine I had asked them if they were interested in the finished cookbook and they loved it but they said no they don't do that sort of thing but he had a friend our editor proc Mel quest had a friend and at crown publishing in New York and he and that's where the manuscript landed they they said they publish it and so that was you know that was the way it went it was really exciting because once you get a book published you kind of have the door open to publishing and so by August we had to leave because dick had accepted a job at the University of minnesota-duluth next we're going to make Carolyn Paiste which is a Karelian hot pot it's a like a stew that is long and slow baked and it's got three kinds of meat in it preferably sometimes you can't always get all three kinds of meat especially the lamb so you'd use half half pork and half half beef and what we do is we mix up I have a pound of diced pork which would be like pork for stew and a pound of beef for stew and a pound of lamb for a stew and we're just going to mix that up I'll mix mix it with my hands and we're going to sprinkle in about 1/2 to 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt per pound then the other there are two other flavoring elements in here that are really important one of them is onions and the other is allspice and the two things cook together really make a special kind of flavor if you don't care for allspice you can use black peppers or whole white peppers but you want to have flavor either peppers or the allspice in there or you can come out and combine the two so I'm slicing up an equal weight of onions to the to the equal to the weight of the the meat so we got three pounds of onions and we got three pounds of beef or beet and then we'll take we're going to layer these things in a pot and I like to start by putting a layer of onion in the very bottom of the pot and then we'll put in a portion of the meat mixture and we'll add some more onion you've got the salt in there already and I'm going to dribble in a few allspice then we're going to layer it back into the pot and add the remainder of the beef or the meat and then slice the remainder of the onions and they go on top the reason the onions I like to have the onions on the bottom and on the top is because they add the moisture to the stew we don't add any broth or water to this pot and we'll press them in you want to pack it down really really well we're packing the whole thing down and then we're gonna add do the lakeil or allspice in here and then the final important step is to take a piece of parchment paper or wax paper and press this down on top of the beef and we press it down real hard and kind of tuck it in like you're [ -_-_ ] sheet all the way around so that there will be no moisture loss and if this ends up being a very very juicy stew now this goes into the oven and we bakes for if you have it at 275 it'll bake for about five hours and right here we have a piece of the pie steamed and that baked for several hours until it's just very soft very well cooked all the way through and just falling apart tender join me next time as we create a perfectly proportioned gourmet meal for two featuring a flavorful standing rib roast crisp salad gigantic popovers in a very Scandinavian dessert I'm Bo Joe Kangas see you next time on welcome to my kitchen you funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund