Thursday 7 February 2008

Finnish rutabaga cake

Polish: żyto
Old Prussian: rogē
Sudovian: rugīs
Quechua: sintinu
Latvian: rudzi
Luxemburgian: Kar
Galician: centeo
Serbian: раж
Slovenian: rž
English: rye
Georgian: ჭვავი

When my sister brought me 2 huge rutabagas, I surfed through all the possible recipes that I could only find in the net, in many languages, especially from Scandinavia. I like the taste of rutabaga, a mix of sweet, spicy and nutty. This great pumpkin-coloured vegetable tastes like turnip and smells like horseradish. I found a recipe how to make Finnish-Karelian Lanttukukko, rutabaga rye pie. Thanks to Varislintu from UniLang who translated the recipe for me! :)

750 ml water
40 ml (about 1 1/2 cup) rye flour
50 g fresh yeast
5 cups flour (wheat)
3-4 tbspoons salt
1 big rutabaga
1 teaspoon sugar
1 kg ground meat
a handful of parsley
1 big onion
2 teaspoons salt, a bit of pepper
butter to grease the pie

1. Mix yeast in warm water. Add rye flour until it is porridge consistency. Leave for an hour.

2. Slice rutabaga (I peel vegetables after cooking) and cook in salted and sugared water until soft (about 20 min).

3. Add flour (about 5 cups or until the dough doesn't stick to the bowl) and 3-4 tbspoons salt to the yeast dough and knead. Cover with towel and let rise in a warm place.

4. Chop onion finely, fry with meat, add 2 tspoons salt, pepper and chooped parsley.

5. When the dough is grown twice, sprinkle your workplace with rye flour and knead again. Pin it out. Now you can make the original rutabaga pie which has a pie shape, or follow my idea of rolling the dough like a twist-cake (strudel). Fill with rutabaga slices and meat, roll. Bake in 250C for about 1 hour (until golden). Grease the top with butter.







The original recipe wants you to wrap the pie in greaseproof aper, newspaper and plastic bag and rest 3 hours in room temperature until soften. I just ate it :)

I don't know if the final result should look like this. My Lanttukukko looks like stuffed bread :) And guess what? I made this dough again, to make delicious breakfast bread rolls :)



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Looks like you've got the proportions wrong as you are supposed to add only just enough wheat flour into the dough to make it a bit easier to handle. The dough is going to bake into a dense shell - some people don't even add any yeast into it. The idea of covering it up is to make it soft enough to cut and eat. This post baking will take about four hours in lower temperature. And please don't call it cake as it's really a pie, a salty one:-)

Ewa said...

Paulivil, well, it was just an experiment, in that time I was exploring rutabaga :) I guess I did everything wrong :P But the leftover-dough-buns were delicious :) Could you suggest me another recipe, please?
Greetings!