@Alan Aspie I've had this before, and it's honestly my all-time favorite food. The university dairy in my town had it for some reason, a while ago. You fry it in a skillet and it doesn't melt and it tastes like some sort of unwholesomely delicious evolution of a cheese pizza. Is this leipäjuusto? What can you tell me about it? I don't know if there are any other Finns on here, but I need to know.
Leipäjuusto. Leipä = bread. Juusto = cheese. The usual way to eat it is with cloudberries - jam or just berries. It's good & not expensive, mundane & festive.
Squeaky cheeses are my favorite genre of cheese. I remember eating leipäjuusto with great fondness. Truly a delicious cheese.
Since you dedicated a whole thread to Finnish cheese bread (no critique), I'd like to expand it to the controversial thing that is Finnish cuisine. @Alan Aspie Explain kaffeost. Did people just leave their coffee creamer out too long, and said "fuck it, that's going in my coffee"? In my mind, the ONLY way kaffeost could work is if it's a natural very sweet/caramel like cheese, which I doubt it is.
No problem with that My aunt spent some time in Finland after high school (apparently yolu tantu means Christmas elf?) and she always likes to talk about salmiakki. Anyway, I've salted my ordinary black licorice before and liked the effect, but do you (@Alan Aspie) have any brand recommendations for purchasing the real deal online?
I don't know. I'm not familiar with it. Kaffe = coffe in Swedish. Ost = cheese in Swedish. It's possible that it's a habbit among Swedish speaking Finns or somewhere else where I do not live. Yolu tantu? You must mean joulutonttu. That's the word for Christmas elf. Salmiakki? That's lot stranger thing than kaffeost. We Finns don't get the term "salty liquorice". It's not salty and it's not liquorice - unless it a mixture of both salmiakki and liquorice when you call it salmiakkilakritsi. Salmiakki = salmiak = ammonium chloride = ammonia + chlorine. We love it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice Wanna buy some online? How about Turkinpippuri? ("Turkish pepper") or Haganol Apteekin Salmiakki or Lakrisal? Something else about food & Finns which we find normal and all the strange people outside Finland do not? How about joulukinkku? (Christmas ham.) We use to buy a whole ham, put it in the oven & bake until it's ok. And it's our most important Christmas food. Last Christmas my family had quite small kinkku. It was only about 6-7kg if I remember it right. You keep in oven about one houir / kg + one hour. So it takes 8 hours to bake 7 kg kinkku. Or berries? We eat them a lot. We get them from our forests & swamps. Pure, fresh, natural, tasty... Our annual lingonberry harvest is about 100 000 000 kg. (It means that about 100 000 000 - 400 000 000 kg does not get picked.) With blueberry it's something very similar. It means almost 20kg + 20kg per a Finn. And that does not cost anything if you pick them yourself.
People do Christmas Ham in the US. Not as much as they used to as the popularity of a giant, boring, slab or processed pork has waned compared to other pork products. Ham on Easter is a different story. That's almost like mandatory... like turkey on Thanksgiving.
Americans do eat a lot of Christmas ham. It's a very Christmassy dish. If you head into the mountains you can find a lot of huckleberries around here. They're like a small purple mountain blueberry, tarter and stronger than a blueberry. Do you have those in Finland? In northern Idaho, there are gift shops devoted entirely to huckleberry products: jams, t-shirts, pies. Harder to find them available fresh. For that, you have to pick them yourself.
I'm not sure if the right word for what I mean is blueberry or huckleberry. The Finnish word for what I mean is mustikka. Internet dictionary gives translations bilberry, huckleberry and blueberry. If I try to translate huckleberry I get 4 different berries. Maybe the right answer is that our country is full of Huckleberry Finns. There is a little Huckleberry inside every Finn.
Vaccinium myrtillus, apparently, which evidently translates to whortleberry. I did some research and apparently the huckleberries that I'm familiar with are Vaccinium membranaceum, but there are a few other species known as "huckleberries." I guess the word is American. The more you know.
It seems that mustikka, the blueberry we have is Vaccinium Myrtillus. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustikka I don't have any knowledge about it's relatives. Maybe huckleberry is that strange cousin no one talks about.
But... I want to honour our dear neighbours, the Swedes and pay attention to their view to gourmet eating. Swedish Surströmming.
We Finns are not Scandinavians. We are the Fenno-Ugrian part of Fennoscandians. (See... Fenno comes first, Scandinavians follow us.) In the past there have been tough times. You ate what you got. If you did not have food, you ate pine tree. It rips your guts to a bloody (literally bloody) mess but you survive without dying to hunger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread Or you could eat litchen or nettle or dandelion leaves or beard moss or... if you have run out of food. Life was tough here in the past. Nowadays it's easy. But there is still some element of surviving in tough conditions in our fat & lazy life. It's under a surface but it's there.
Can I just call you all snowmen? Finland can be a hard kind of place, I'd guess. Cool video, by the way. Reminds me of this song
Surstroemming is fermented. I love all kinds of fish, but I think I would hesitate to try surstroemming.
It is! They can't use Surströmming as barrel bombs in Syria because of both biological and chemical warfare limitations.
