Here’s something a little different – a sweetened dough from the Nordic countries, particularly Finland. It’s the Northern European version of brioche, a bread dough packed with butter and sugar, stuffed with a variety of fruits, creams and spices, as the baker sees fit.
Pulla buns are best made as enormous, fist-sized wedges, each looking just that bit too big for a single person to eat. There needs to be some heft to them, enough to provoke a faint gasp from the recipient. Don’t be shy of shaping these buns on the large size.
As with most breads and doughs, pulla dough is best made the night before and allowed to rise and ferment overnight in the fridge. The benefits of a long, slow fermentation are incredible, and it’s the investment of this extended period of time to allow the dough to develop a character and complexity of its own that divides good bread made properly from commercial loaves and doughs made badly. And by ‘badly’, I mean ‘quickly’.
There’s nothing unusual about pulla dough. It has everything you’d expect to see in an enriched dough, with one extra ingredient – ground cardamom. Cardamom is widely used as a spice in baking across the Nordics, and it’s often found in traditional Christmas pastries. It has that distinctive taste of winter to it, a fiery pang that sits somewhere vaguely over there with nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. In this recipe, the seeds are crushed rather than completely ground, so that there’s a degree of bite left to them.
, is as comprehensive and encyclopedic a view of the cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean, or Middle East, as you’re likely to find, a fascinating, engrossing and beautiful account of a life illustrated by food. Helou grew up between Syria and Lebanon, and documents the food of her home countries delicately and in detail, widening her attention to the surrounding lands, describing in detail the food and customs of these most vibrant and vital of culinary lands.
