{"id":1000,"date":"2021-04-04T20:30:11","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T03:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2021-04-05T21:28:43","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T04:28:43","slug":"international-meals-estonia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=1000","title":{"rendered":"International Meals – Estonia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Estonia was interesting.\u00a0 A few, well – not exactly\u00a0failures<\/em> – but not exactly blazing successes, either.<\/p>\n

After our hilariously<\/em> awful attempt at locating Danish bread<\/a> a few months ago, I decided to take no chances and start a sourdough a week before the meal so we could bake the bread of Estonia ourselves.\u00a0 We did have a sour going last spring, when everyone and their cousin was discovering how to bake without yeast. Its name was “Oscar.” Oscar did not make it to Vancouver with us.<\/p>\n

And then on Friday, I found this:<\/p>\n

\"Estonian<\/a><\/p>\n

OK, so – we’ll make a loaf, and we’ll compare it to the real stuff, and that will be interesting.<\/p>\n

Welp – it was that.<\/p>\n

The recipe we had certainly sounded tasty – it used pumpkin, flax, fennel, and caraway seeds, in addition to molasses, coffee, and cocoa. It uses a standard sourdough rye technique, where you let the sour get a head start on rising before you add any other ingredients that might slow it down.<\/p>\n

For whatever reason, though – the sour was too stiff, I didn’t mix it properly, wrong temperature, or something else – the dough never really… doughed.\u00a0 It was more of a wet sticky blob that never came together. Between that and the fact that it was dark brown, it looked quite unsettling.<\/p>\n

\"Estonian<\/a><\/p>\n

It was at this point that we realized that we had missed just how long of a rise time the recipe called for, and that this bread wasn’t even going to be ready for dinner.\u00a0 So we’ll come back to our bread, and just eat the commercial stuff.<\/p>\n

For our appetizer, we were going to put some sprats on the actual Estonian bread from actual Estonia.\u00a0 Since that involved opening a can and putting fish on bread with butter, we managed not to screw it up.<\/p>\n

\"Sprats<\/a><\/p>\n

Our main course was a porridge called m<\/em>ulgipuder<\/em>. The essential ingredients for this dish are pearl barley and potatoes.\u00a0 If you’re not familiar with pearl barley, it looks like this before it’s cooked:<\/p>\n

\"Pearl<\/a><\/p>\n

That goes into a pot with some potatoes to boil for an hour.<\/p>\n

For some versions of the dish, that would be it. We wanted to get a bit more fancy, so we went with a recipe that also called for mushrooms and smoked pork hock.\u00a0 That’s right – the giant hunk o’ pig is back, after making its last appearance for Croatia.<\/p>\n

\"Pork<\/a><\/p>\n

We sliced off enough for this recipe, and threw the rest in the pressure cooker the next night to make a very nice bean stew.<\/p>\n

In addition to the pork hock, we fried up some mushrooms as well.<\/p>\n

\"Frying<\/a><\/p>\n

Once the potatoes and the barley had finished cooking, in went the immersion blender.\u00a0 There’s a lot of different versions of this recipe online, and the photos range from “extremely chunky” to “whipped smooth.”\u00a0 We had enough water left in the pot that we ended up on the smoother end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

And here’s the final spread:<\/p>\n

\"Overhead<\/a><\/p>\n

And it was pretty good!\u00a0 Bread and butter with oily fish made for a very hearty appetizer.\u00a0 If you like sardines, you’ll like sprats.\u00a0 In fact, unless you are very, very serious about sardines, you’ll have great difficulty distinguishing <\/em>them from sprats. The bread itself was\u00a0quite\u00a0<\/em>sour, and very dense and chewy. A delicious combination, which I did not hesitate to repeat for lunch the next day.<\/p>\n

The barley definitely gave the mulgipuder a bit more personality by itself than simple mashed potatoes, and the addition of the ham and mushrooms made for a filling and satisfying dish.\u00a0 Overall, it was exactly what one would expect from the Baltics – dark bread, ham, potatoes, and fish.\u00a0 And that’s great, because we like all those things!<\/p>\n

I’ll also point out that we managed to acquire an actual Estonian beer! It wasn’t a traditional beer by any means.\u00a0 Probably a lot of alcohol would scream “the Baltic states” more than a Scotch Ale aged in port wine barrels.\u00a0 But oh man<\/em> was it good, and it was<\/em> made in Estonia (“By Finns, Dan” “Shut up<\/em>, internal monologue!”) so it counts.<\/p>\n

Now let’s talk about partial success number 2.\u00a0 (Don’t worry, we’ll get back to the bread) “Partial Success” is like “Partly Sunny”, in that it can also mean “Partial Failure.” Since we were having this meal on Easter, we decided to close the meal with a traditional Estonian dessert that is often served on that holiday –\u00a0Pasha.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pasha is NOT a dish for the lactose intolerant. It involves farmer’s cheese (we used Ricotta), sour cream, butter, AND heavy cream. Those are blended with butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla to make what is essentially a cheesecake batter.<\/p>\n

\"Pasha<\/a><\/p>\n

The mixture is simmered for a bit to thicken it, and then the fun starts.<\/p>\n

You put cheesecloth in a sieve.\u00a0 You put the sieve over a bowl.\u00a0 The batter goes in the cheesecloth in a sieve over a bowl, with their paddles in a puddle in a bottle on a poodle.\u00a0 Sorry.\u00a0 You pour the mixture into the cheesecloth, fold the cloth over, and then put a weight on the whole assembly.<\/p>\n

\"Pasha<\/a><\/p>\n

In theory, this squeezes out a bunch of moisture, and when you unmold it and tip it over on a plate, you get a beautiful dome of dairy.\u00a0 That’s what all the pictures show, anyway.\u00a0 Possibly because the Estonian Tourist Bureau doesn’t think anyone would want to eat a dessert that ended up looking like this:<\/p>\n

\"Pasha\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It did NOT hold its shape, suffice to say.\u00a0 And a spoon was definitely more useful than a fork would have been at attempting to consume it.<\/p>\n

But, just as “party cloudy” can also be “partly sunny,” this partial failure also succeeded at being delicious.\u00a0 I mean – it’s a cheesecake.\u00a0 Even just licking the batters was delicious, and so was the final product. (And lets be honest – there wasn’t a ton of difference between the two.) We topped it with some mixed peel, and the little bit of chewiness was a welcome textural contrast too.<\/p>\n

And now we can’t put it off any longer, so let’s find out about the bread.\u00a0 After four hours, it had barely risen.\u00a0 But no harm in baking it to see what happens, right?\u00a0 We cranked up the oven to the specified 480 F (yowzers), heated up the Dutch oven, and baked the daylights out of it, to end up with a “loaf” that could charitably be described as not looking\u00a0completely<\/em> like a meteorite.<\/p>\n

\"Homemade<\/a>
\nLarge pockets of unmixed sourdough were definitely visible in the final bake.\u00a0 I think in hindsight I should have added the water to the sour at the very beginning and mixed that in thoroughly before adding any other ingredients.\u00a0 After that point, the sour just didn’t want to break up.<\/p>\n

However… despite everything, the bread was actually pretty tasty!\u00a0 It was dense and chewy, but that’s OK in a dark bread.\u00a0 All the toasted seeds gave it a great crunch, and the Dutch oven mean the crust was nice and crispy.\u00a0 We probably won’t try to make it again, just because we’ve had actual pets that are less work than the sour starter, but I don’t regret this loaf.<\/p>\n

And that’s Estonia.\u00a0 Next time, because of a name change just three years ago, we are off to the country formerly known as Swaziland – Eswatini!<\/p>\n

Recipes:
\nEstonian Black Bread<\/a>
\nMulgipuder<\/a>
\nPasha (Estonian Easter Dessert)<\/a>
\nSprat Sandwich – You put sprats on buttered bread. Add chopped green onion or sour cream if you like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Estonia was interesting.\u00a0 A few, well – not exactly\u00a0failures – but not exactly blazing successes, either. After our hilariously awful attempt at locating Danish bread a few months ago, I decided to take no chances and start a sourdough a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-meals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}