The Art of Making Pettuleipä: A Traditional Finnish Bread Recipe

As I began my journey to learn how to make pettuleipä, a traditional Finnish bread recipe that uses pine bark flour, I was excited to discover the unique process and ingredients involved. My friend had sent me 700 grams of 'pettu janho', which is the pine-bark flour used in this recipe, and I was eager to get started.

The first step in making pettuleipä was to mix together 117 milliliters of pettu janho with 100 milliliters of rye and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. I mixed these ingredients really well until they formed a soft dough. It was interesting to see how the pettu janho, which smelled like sawdust, began to take shape into a dough-like consistency.

Next, I added another 50 milliliters of pettu janho and then 167 milliliters of rye to the mixture. This combination created a very soft dough that was perfect for shaping into bread rings. According to the video of the older gentleman making pettuleipä, he used white flour to form the dough rings, so I used a little bit of regular all-purpose flour to achieve the same effect.

I flattened out small disks of dough with my hands and then used a cookie cutter, which looked like part of a horn that had been cut off at the tip, to create a ring-shaped hole in the center of each disk. This gave the bread its distinctive shape. I placed the rings on parchment paper and let them rise for about an hour and a half.

Finally, it was time to bake the pettuleipä in a very hot oven at 225°C to 250°C (450°F) for 10 to 15 minutes, or until they were cooked. As I waited for the breads to bake, I could smell the sourdough aroma wafting from the oven, and my stomach growled with anticipation.

After 15 minutes, I removed the pettuleipä from the oven and let them cool. And then... it was time to taste! I carefully sliced one of the loaves open and revealed a crumb that looked like it had been poured into a mold. The bread was dense and moist, with a lovely crumb structure that was typical of sourdough bread.

The first bite was a revelation - the sourdough flavor was intense and delicious, but the pine bark flour added a unique twist to the traditional recipe. At first, I could taste the earthy sweetness of the pine, but as I chewed, the bitterness began to emerge. It was quite strong, but not unpleasant.

Just as I was about to give up on the bread, I remembered that I had some butter in the fridge. A pat of butter transformed the bread into something truly special - the sourness and bitterness of the pine bark flour were balanced out by the richness of the butter. Mmm... it was a match made in heaven!

I imagined enjoying this pettuleipä with a thick slab of farmer's cheese on top, and I couldn't wait to try it that way. For famine food, this bread is actually pretty good - especially with butter! I have to say, making pettuleipä was a really fun process, and I loved watching the raski (sourdough starter) develop and change over time.

As I sat down to enjoy my freshly baked pettuleipä, I realized that this traditional Finnish recipe is more than just a food - it's a connection to the past, a way of preserving cultural heritage, and a celebration of the simple pleasures in life. And now, with my jar of sourdough starter growing in my refrigerator, I'm excited to start experimenting with new recipes and exploring the world of traditional Finnish baking.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings my beautiful lovelies. It's Emmy. Welcome back to another episode of Hard Timeswhere I explore food and recipes from times of hardship.Today I'm going to do a special Finnish edition because lovely Anna suggested this recipe to me.Not only did she suggest this recipe to me, but she also sent me --the ingredients I need to make this recipe!So Ana thank you so much for both suggesting this recipe and for sending me the necessary ingredients.And today I'm gonna be making 'pettuleipa'.And pettuleipa (sorry for my terrible Finnish) is pine bark bread.So this type of bread was made during times of famine and pine bark, actually inner pine bark, actually called the phloem,was harvested dried and ground into a flour and added in combination with wheat as a way to kind of extend the wheat flour.So Anna tells me that other Nordic countries also use pine bark as a way to extend flourbut the Finns actually take great pride in this particular recipe and she sent me two videos,I used both of those videos as references to create the pine bark bread that I'm gonna make today.So one of the videos actually has schoolchildren making this at school as a way to remembernot only their history but their heritage.So very stinking cute!So the rescue that the schoolchildren used is the one that I'm gonna be using today on a very kindly and very thoroughlytranslated it from the Finnish to English for me, so I could make it today and on Anna's recommendation,I cut it by 1/6. AlsoI want to make sure that I had enough flour had this not come out properly that I could try it again.I also recommend the other video that Anna sent me. I'll put the link to both videos down in descriptionand it's of an older fellow actually harvesting the inner bark and you can see howlaborious the process is. He uses a special wooden tool that he's made toscrape and harvest beautiful sheets of the phloem or the inner bark and then he dries it and then hepulverize it and then he goes on to make the bread. That video is very useful to me because then I could see the consistencyof the dough and I could see how he formed the actual breads. The breads are quite charming,they're round and relatively flat and they have a little hole in the middle of themSo to start this whole process I need to get my hands on sourdough starter. That's what's gonna give this doughnot only flavor but gonna give it a little bit of leavening as well.So I called up my favorite local bakery and around here in Providence,that's 'Seven Stars Bakery' and I got a little bit of their sourdough starter, which was absolutely wonderful.I was told by the bakery that I needed to use this immediately. Once you have sourdough starteryou need to keep it alive. You take a portion of it awayand then you add equal amounts of flour and water-a 1/4 cup of flour, a 1/4 cup of water, stir that all together and then you can keep that in your fridge for about a weekbefore you need to feed it again.You need to keep feeding it and feeding it because what you're doing is growing the sourdough, if you don't give it more flour andreduce the population of goodies in there and then it will die. And yesterday with my leftoversourdough, I made sourdough waffles. I used the 'King Arthur Flour' recipe and they were absolutely delicious.So sourdough is just a great thing to have on hand if you can get your little mitts on it.Okay, so I got the sourdough starter. So day 1we needed to create the 'raski' and that is a preferment, kind of similar to a 'barm' or a 'poolish'. It'sthe sourdough starter along with a little bit of flour and some water and it starts to grow a bit and that's what's gonna giveyou some of that flavor in your bread and some of that, you know, puffness.Two and a half teaspoons of my sourdough starter.333 milliliters of warm water, at 37°C (98.6°F) and I added 250 milliliters of rye flour.So Anna very kindly sent me this, and this is one kilogram of beautiful Finnish rye flour.She said she didn't trust the U.S. rye flour, which I totally agree. She wanted rye that was grown in moonless nights.And so this is the real deal. Mix this all really well,you want the sourdough starter to be mixed in really well with the rye and then I used anapkin and cover that loosely and put it in a warm place, room temperature is fine, for twelve to fourteen hours.So day two, we take our starterAnd then 83 milliliters ofrye flour, and now we add 83 milliliters of warm water- same temperature again,and then you'll have a mixture kind of the consistency of porridge.So then after another twelve to fourteen hours, we're ready to introduce our 'pettu'. And pettu is the pine-bark flour.She sent me 700 grams of 'pettu janho'And this is the flour that's made from the inner bark of a pine tree.But it smells lovely it, smells and looks a lot like sawdust- a little bit finer than sawdust actuallybut fact what's reminiscent of. Not surprising though right? In our first we're going to add117 milliliters of the pettu janho and then we're going to add 100 milliliters ofrye and then 1/2 teaspoons of salt. Mix that really well and now it's becoming to look more like a dough.Then we're going to add another 50 milliliters of pettu and thena 167 milliliters of rye.So then after we combine this all together, we're gonna have it kind of very soft dough.So now we're ready to shape our breads and based on the video of the older gentlemen making pettuleipä,I saw that he used what looked like white flour to form the dough rings.So I use a little bit of just regular all-purpose flour, flatten it intodisks with your hands and then use some sort of cookie cutter-he actually uses part of a horn where the tip has been cut off anduses that to cut a little hole in the middle.Now you've got your ring of dough and I place this on parchment and you're supposed to let this rise so I let mine sit forabout an hour and a half. Then I bake this in a very hot oven225°C to 250°C which translates to about 450°F for 10 to 15 minutes,or until the breads are cooked. So after 15 minutes, this is what I have. Aren't they beautiful?I have to say as they were baking I could really smell the sourdough.I'm trying to see if I can smell any of the pine.No, it just smells very sour, almost smells like mustard.You know mustard the condiment, not mustard the seed but it almost smells like that- a little bit vinegar.So the very last pettuleipä I made was a very large one and from the middle, I made this little tiny one.All right, let's go ahead and taste our pine bark bread. Now let me open it up for youand look, it does have a crumb.Remember, there's no yeast. There's no baking soda. There's no baking powder.The only thing that leaven this was the natural little goodies that are inside the sourdough and the CO2 bubblesthey create, creates the bubbles inside the bread.'Hyvää ruokahalua!' (Enjoy your meal!) Here we go.Hmm..Oh!Wow! So initiallyit doesn't taste too bad. That sourdough flavor is very intense and delicious.Nice and sourdoughy, very familiar if you like sourdough bread, and the texture of the bread is pretty good. It's definitely leavened,it's got some air pockets and bubbles and crumb. The crumb is actually quite moist.It is dense.And you do have the flavor of the pine in there,but what's really interesting at the very kind of end of it-you've got a sourness and a strong bitterness that I imagine comes from the pine bark flour.Mm-hmm. I wouldn't say it's delicious because it is very sour and very bitter. And the pine flavor is not something I'm used to it's,very resinous, a little bithoppy quite strong, but not like I'm having pine needles or even pine needle teabut it's definitely present. Maybe a little butter will help- be right back!Mm-hmmMm-hmm. That actually makes it taste pretty good. It really balances out that sourness and bitterness of the pine bark flour,with the butter it's actually quite tasty. I like that,Mmm, and I imagine this with a nice thick slab of farmer's cheese on that. It would be delicious! Honestly, for famine foodthis is actually pretty good- with butterMm-hmm. So this is a really fun recipe to make yes, it took three days, but it was not that much effortIt was just kind of stretched out over a matter of days.It was fun to watch the raski kind of developed and changed and grow and smell, I could smell the sourdough.It was really really fun process. So now I've got a jar of sourdough starter growing in my refrigerator. I'm super excitedI'm going to be starting a new series called'\"Fermentation\" andjust starting little recipes all about fermenting.I've made kimchi, many viewers requested that so I'm going to do that oneI'm gonna do kefir, which is the drink that I'm in love with now, and all kinds of other like cheesy,fermenting, kind of fun things to try becauseit's alive and growing and I'm fascinated by that. Back when I lived in MontanaI did some of these experiments. I made my own ginger brew. I made my own kombucha. I made my own sourdough.So I may revisit some of those recipes if you guys are interested. If you want some my kombucha video-it's a really old one, I'll put a link down below and up there in case you're interested. All right bigthanks again to Anna for sending me all of these lovely things and oh, but she also sent me my favorite Finnish candy bar --it's a Pätkis!I love these! I love these. She said she sent this to kind of make up for the bad tasting bread,but I actually found it quite good, but I'm gonna taste a Pätkis,I haven't had one of these in at least a couple years --so super excited for this. If you haven't seen my \"Emmy Eats Finland\" videos, I'll also put those links down below.So the reason why Pätkis is one of my favorite chocolate bars is because it's chocolate mint. Yay!I don't think I've had a Pätkis bar this large before.There it is. It's made by the company 'Fazer' and they also makesalmiakki, which is probably my least favorite candy -- if not thing -- ever, ever.Salty licorice, if you've never had it.It's worth trying just to say you've tried it. A lot of people like it. I can't stand it! I find it terrible!I don't understand why people like it, but I know people do but I am certainly not in that camp.Okay, I can already smell my pätkis, it's time to eat.Oh it smells so good!Minty, pepperminty and chocolate- ah!Just.Heavenly.So stinking good. Kind of reminiscent of an Andes mint, that beautiful combination of chocolate and peppermint. Thathas more a brutal texture. This is more of a milk chocolate texture, smooth, melt away,very very very smooth consistency.It's almost like European nougat. Good quality milk chocolate, sweet. It's just the perfect balance of chocolate, peppermint.Delicious wonderfulness. So that was a really fun way to end a 'Hard Times' episode with a little bit of good times.Big thanks again to Anna for sending me all of these wonderful things,for suggesting this recipe, for translating the recipe, and just for going to such lengths for me to be able to make this for you guys.Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed that one. I hope you guys learned something, pleaseshare this video with your friends.Follow me on social media, subscribe and like this video and I shall see you in the next one. Toodle-loo, take care. Bye!Hoo hoo, hoo hoo (Owl hooting.)\n"