Easter ‘Baking’

I heard this earlier as I started to get this ready. Egotrippi and Matkustaja (The Passenger).

Easter Monday we arrived home mid afternoon, after a slightly nerve-racking ‘will we won’t we make it’? to the next fuel stop before we hit empty. In the end it was just and just okay…

I’d been counting on our local corner shop to be open so we could restock the fridge. Unfortunately, that part of the plan fell through. So it was back to scrounging through the cupboards to come up with something for dinner. Not to heavy, and not so light that we’d be hungry again by bedtime.

Potatoes + flour + eggs = potato bread. Page 364 of Ruokatorstai *. Perunarieskat ** coming up!

Recipes!

First step is to cook the potatoes You can cheat and use instant mix, which I’ve done in the past. It works, however the texture and flavour aren’t quite the same.

Spuds on the go

Step 2 is the mashing: The best bit, although if I was mashing for normal eating now is the time I’d pour in some hot milk or toss in a few chunks of butter…

Let’s mash

Now once we have the mash, it’s best to let it cool a while.

Cooling Mash!

So while the mash cools we gather up the rest of the ingredients: barley (ohra) flour, eggs and salt.

Everything ready?

The over is set to 250 C, baking trays covered with paper and we’re set to make some dough.

Lumpen mass (is that even a real word?)

Now comes the fun part. The dough needs to be worked into snake-like shapes in preparation for slicing (cutting) into rounds.

Snakes or slugs?

So my slugs of dough are cut up into nice rounds which are then squashed and place on to the baking tray.

Into the oven we go

Once they go into the extremely hot oven it is only a matter of minutes before they can be pulled out and left to cool.

Careful… hot!

After a few minutes, transfer your potato bread to a serving plate. Serve as an accompaniment to soup or on their own. Great with just butter, especially when they are fresh from the oven.

Ready to eat

* Literally translates as Food Thursday. Collection of recipes published in Helsingin Sanomat’s Thursday food column. One of my favourite Finnish recipe books.

** Potato flatbreads. There are many different versions of rieska, this one is a family staple.