Finnish Pulla Bread at home: Yeast Has Risen

Pulla might be more of a Christmas thing because of its unique spicing, but on Good Friday some sort of special bread is never inappropriate. The metaphor of yeast rising, regeneration and the golden promise of the bread of life is irresistible and finds its manifestation in babka, kulich, hot cross buns, colomba, paska and many others. The recent arrival of both a new Iittala “Taika” mug from Finland (ordered more than two years ago through William Ashley) and an inspiring discussion on the topic of Scandinavian food with a Finnish exchange co-worker pushed Pulla to the forefront of my mind: it was the clear choice for the Easter Bread of 2013.

I’ve been collecting “Taika” pieces since my daughter turned one, because of all the potential names we could have given her, we were very partial to “Taika”, which means “magic” in Finnish (and I didn’t find out about the china pattern until after I discovered the name). Ultimately we backed off on it as a given name, because it was too weird, too difficult to pronounce, she would spend her whole life answering the same questions about it, but we kept it as her secret, special undocumented name. Okay, until I published it on the internet.

I’ve made Pulla before, but wasn’t that crazy about the results. I used an authentic recipe from the Finnish mother of a friend of a friend and found the dough stiff and heavy and difficult to work with, although the eventual result was pretty good. My friend and I made it from time to time while we lived together during our undergrad at UBC, because bread making works beautifully in consort with the student lifestyle: it is (a) cheap, (b) relaxing, (c) produces copious amounts of carbohydrates that the 19 year old body has little difficulty disposing of, and (d) the process involves short bursts of activity, punctuated by perfect 1 hour study periods, and concludes with several delicious slices of freshly baked warm bread.

I looked around on the internet for another Pulla recipe (reproduced below) and found one with less flour, which sounded good to me because I thought it might produce a softer and more workable dough. For optimal results, I also invested in some special ingredients, like fresh cardamom:

I bought a brand new package and was glad I did. The fragrance as I broke up the pods and removed the seeds was exotic and intense. You can use just regular ground cardamom, but it will be neither fresh and aromatic, or authentic. My Finnish co-worker confirmed that it should be possible to get bits of cardamom stuck in your teeth while eating Pulla (pronounced “Pul-la” with equal emphasis on both ls, by the way), so it’s crushed cardamom that should be used, not ground. I gave the seeds the fine coffee grinder treatment:

What you eventually want is something that looks like coarse cardamom sand. You probably also want more than what the recipe calls for, which is 1 teaspoon (I put in something closer to 2)….one recipe I looked at called for 4 and was harshly criticized in the comments section for having an unpleasantly forward flavour, but these were North Americans doing the complaining and not Finns. Better to err on the side of being Finnish, here, I think. Anyway, the cardamom went in with some flour, salt, and half the sugar, and against the strident orders of the recipe, I proofed the yeast separately in warm milk and water with half the sugar added to it. I beat the eggs and melted the butter and added them separately at the point of pouring the yeast liquid into the flour base.

I have an untested theory that melted butter suffocates the yeast or something if you add it to the hot milk or water at the point of proofing: I’ve had trouble more than once getting dough with that order of procedure to rise, so I avoided it here. A note on the butter:

This is quite good butter from Hastings County, east of Toronto but west of Kingston. It may be the highest butterfat butter you can get in Canada at the moment. Whether or not it makes any difference to the dough, it definitely tastes great on the end product.

Everything started out pretty runny:
But it smartened up once the rest of the flour went in. As per the recipe, I decided to experiment with technology and see how the bread hook would make out on the Ol’ Kitchenaid:

And indeed, all went well for about three minutes until the unmistakable stench of burning motor oil became dominant on the wind. I finished it off by hand, something I enjoy doing anyway. The repetitive push and turn, push and turn of a pliant, soft dough, minute after minute, not only works up some good gluten in the dough, but smooths out the rough edges of one’s mind at the same time. Another note on the ingredients here: this was the first time in my life I tried using specially identified “bread flour” to make bread and there was a noticeable difference. The dough was warm and sinuous in my hands, wonderful to handle and within a short period of time was silken and elastic:

Then it rose for an hour. I live in a house built in 1928 and it’s like winter camping in a brick tent, so I preheated the oven to about 180F, cut the heat and let the dough rise in there. Works like a voodoo charm:

Then I punched it down, ignored the recipe again and divided it into six ropes instead of nine: because I thought, less flour, so I’m going to wind up with three puny little loaves, right? I can’t be having that. So I braided them:

So pretty! These are going to be so great! As I carried them smugly back to the oven for the second rising (tenderly tucked under a blanket of buttered parchment and a tea towel, of course) a sense of competence and serenity came over me. Perhaps next I will turn my beautiful Nordic face to the sun and take my snow white laundry down off the line while a stiff breeze blows in off the Baltic, or I will herd my geese, or make cheese, or do some complex embroidery or compose some slightly sad and atonal music. Instead I made pancakes for my ravenous family (but not from a mix, no way!).

After an hour, I peeked under the towel….and realized WHY real Pulla recipes have a lot of flour in them, and why the dough tends to be stiff and unmanageable. No picture, Dear Reader, because under the towel were two bloated, flattened, oozing masses of insipid white dough lying on their backs like passed-out Elvis impersonators. Hardly a trace of my elegant braiding remained, because….the dough has to be stiff enough not to spread out into an undisciplined puddle as the gas builds up in the dough. Live and learn. So, I scooped it up into three hastily buttered loaf pans, left it for another 30 minute rise, then painted it with beaten egg and sprinkled it with coarse sanding sugar before I threw it in the oven and let it fend for itself for roughly 27 minutes while I took a shower.

It came out like this:

Not bad, considering. And slathered with Stirling Creamery “84” butter, fresh out of the oven with a strong cup of coffee in one of our Taika cups, it tasted pretty good:

I think I’ll continue to futz with this recipe: I still want it be in the form of concise, braided loaves and I think it could be with a bit more flour. It could also be a touch warmer and spicier with the addition of more cardamom, and maybe even a bit sweeter although the subtlety of the sugar is pleasantly understated in the current version. It’s not a light, feathery bread but neither is it overly dense…it’s moist and has a good crumb. Taika herself enjoyed it very much:
Which, by itself, is a good enough reason to make it again.

FINNISH PULLA BREAD

7 cups of flour (use bread flour if you can, and I would put in at least one more cup than this unless you want to bake it in loaf pans)
4 1/2 tsp regular yeast (two packets)
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp crushed seeds from green cardamom pods (I suggest 2-3x this amount)
1 beaten egg and some coarse white sugar for finishing

Combine 2 1/2 cups of the flour, 1/3 cup sugar, the salt and cardamom in a bowl. Warm the milk and water, add 1/3 cup sugar to it, mix in the yeast and proof for 10 minutes.

Pour the milk/water/yeast culture into the flour mixture, add the melted butter and 2 beaten eggs. Mix it up well (about 3 minutes if you’re using a Kitchenaid stand mixer, use the dough hook). Add the rest of the flour and knead (or let the machine do it) for 5 – 10 minutes, until you’ve got a nice smooth dough. Let it rise, covered, in a greased bowl for about an hour in a warm place. Punch it down, separate into 3 pieces, then separate those into three or two pieces, depending on whether you want 2 large loaves or 3 smaller ones. Braid them loosely into loaves, tuck the ends underneath, let them rise, covered, a second time for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350F, paint with beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar. Bake 25-30 minutes, until golden brown. Don’t bake much longer than that because there’s a lot of sugar in the dough and it will burn easily.