Hatsapuri

 

Happy New Year 2022 everyone! I hope that you had a nice celebration. We did our usual thing: dinner and drinks at home and then watching some fireworks drinking mulled wine from a thermos mug. It was quite a calm party.

Before we went outside our late New Year’s Eve’s dinner was Hatsapuri, a Georgian cheese bread that is oozing soft melting cheese in the middle. I mainly followed a Finnish recipe by Valio for it, but below is my version with a few amendments. I used a blend of three cheeses and I think that it worked quite well. I was thrilled to find blood oranges at the local market, so we had a fresh blood orange salad on the side.

 

 

The starters: carrots and hummus and chocolates.

And some of the fireworks at midnight.

Hatsapuri

Ingredients

1 dl water
½ tbsp dry yeast
3 dl wheat flour
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp oil
100 g mozzarella
25 g cheddar
25 g smoked burrata

Method

Mix the lukewarm water with yeast and 1/2 dl of the flour. Leave it for about 30 minutes until it bubbles.

Add all other ingredients apart from the cheese and knead. Let the dough rise for 3 hours and knock it back hourly.

Roll the dough out thinly into a circle and fill it with the cheese. Fold the dough over the cheese to cover it.

Bake at 250C for about 10-15 minutes. Serve hot when the cheese is still soft and enjoy!

Your VegHog

 

Homemade pita bread

I have never made pita myself before, but I got a little bit tired of the hardish supermarket pitas that seemed to be the only ones that I could find here. I explored some recipes online and found this easy homemade pita bread recipe by The Mediterranean dish. It was a good recipe to follow and I think that my results were alright in the end. It made eight pitas and the dough also keeps in the fridge for a few days, if you don't want to make all of them at once. I would like to try making pita bread again in case the method can be improved, but it was a good start. I made my pitas pan-fried this time, as it was too hot to put the oven on.

The first pita dish was pan-fried pita with homemade butterbean hummus and veggies.

And the second was a topped heart-shaped pita with hummus, veggies and feta.

What is your favourite way of eating pitas? Have a nice weekend!

Your VegHog

 

Blue potato focaccia

I’ve done some savoury baking again and there will be more of it getting closer to Christmas. I got some marvellous blue potatoes from a local shop, so I made this focaccia with them to showcase them properly. They would add a nice splash of colour to any dish. This was just a fluffy focaccia with pre-cooked blue potatoes, onion slices and garlic.

Your VegHog

 

Finnish Christmas tarts

 

I baked Finnish Christmas or star tarts with puff pastry, but a less traditional version, as I used Finlandia marmelades as the filling, which traditionally is prune jam. I also made savoury tarts in the same shape with cheese and smoked paprika filling. Both versions were very tasty and disappeared in no time. This means I’ll have to make another batch closer to Christmas.

 

Your VegHog

 

Karjalanpiirakat

 

It’s Finland’s independence day today, so I’m again sharing my favourite Finnish pies with you. These are savoury Karelian pies or pastries. The filling is rice pudding and the crust is a mix of rye and wheat flours. The crust is very similar to a pizza dough, it’s just rolled out very thinly for these pies. In my childhood I often made these pies with my grandmother, so she taught me also the method of closing the dough in a pretty way on the top. I thought that these turned out really nice and I scoffed them all in no time. I also made some with potato mash filling, which are my partner’s favourites. 

 

Before baking

 

With potato filling

 

Your VegHog

 

Pretzel dough flatbreads

 

It now seems a lifetime away that I lived in Germany. I moved away from there in 2007, so it has been a while indeed. I spent nearly ten years in Cologne, so of course I still miss many things from there. Today’s food is one of those things. There was, and still is, a bakery chain making these tasty flatbreads on a pretzel dough base. I would often get one as a snack on the go. That’s where my inspiration for these flatbreads comes from.

I made half of my flatbreads with an onion, garlic and Cheddar filling and the other half with bell peppers and Mozzarella. I also made sodium carbonate to make my basic pizza dough taste like pretzels. The dough is dipped in the sodium carbonate for a while before hand-stretching, filling and baking the flatbread. You can read all about this method in my previous Pretzel roll post.

Have a nice weekend!

Your VegHog

 

Shallot focaccia

 

I’ve had a nice holiday week so far. It has been very relaxing, just as I intended. I started today with a swim in the harbour, which is so refreshing and really wakes you up. We’ve visited some museums and local marketplaces, had a few beers in beer gardens and just read books. I’ve also done some watercolour painting. I’m not a good painter, but I like it.

Here is yet another focaccia bread that I’ve made. It’s a simple focaccia with pink shallots. It goes well with those autumnal soups or even on its own.

 Have a nice rest of the week!

Your VegHog

 

Decorated focaccia - Sunflowers

I made another decorated focaccia, because making the first one was so much fun. I was inspired by Vincent van Gogh this time and followed a sunflower theme. The bell peppers were also nice on the focaccia and I’m already thinking about my next theme. Do you have any suggestions or have you made a decorated focaccia?

We will go to the seaside in a minute and will just have a relaxing Sunday picnic there. I hope you’ll have a great day!

Your VegHog

Decorated focaccia

I’ve had a lovely week travelling in Denmark visiting many beautiful places on the shore and several museums. But above all, I’ve been taking it easy trying not to think about work, and it has been great. The government has a summer scheme and one part of that is that museum tickets are half price. I will go to one more museum today, as it’s the perfect timing for it now. The weather hasn’t been the greatest, a bit cloudy all the time, but that’s actually a good walking weather. Today seems to be a bit sunnier.

I’ve been admiring this trend of beautiful decorated focaccia breads for a while now and now I got experimenting myself. My bread is of course not nearly as beautiful as some of the creations I’ve seen online, but it turned alright. Such a bread would be really nice to offer to some guests. I will be practising more to make better ones. The bread dough was alright, I just made my basic pizza dough with a little addition of sugar and made it a bit softer. It was rising well and made a fluffy focaccia. The toppings were heirloom tomatoes, basil, fresh onion stalks, shallots and green olives with addition of sea salt and olive oil.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Your VegHog

Pølsehorn – Danish sausage rolls vegetarian style

The Danish society is opening up more and more. Bars and restaurants opened on Monday and it looks like people are keen to visit them again. Yesterday we went to a shopping centre and apart from hand sanitiser bottles being everywhere and floors marked with stickers, it felt pretty much like business as usual. I already worked three days in the office this week and from next week everyone is encouraged to return. It feels weird after over two months of lockdown and working from home, but I guess we’ll have to listen to the officials’ recommendations. As I moved home during lockdown, I now also have a new train commute to work, which is slightly shorter than the old one.

Now don’t mistake these baked goods for croissants, or you might have quite a surprise when you taste them. These are Pølsehorn (lit. sausage horn) which are popular sausage rolls in Denmark. The sausages are wrapped in a fluffy dough and then baked.

I of course made a vegetarian version of Pølsehorn by using these new vegan chorizos made from peas that are also gluten and soya free. These spicy sausages worked really well in this combo. In order to make it a really easy breakfast, brunch or snack item, I just used a ready made pastry from the shop. That way they were really quick and easy to make. The pastry wasn’t vegan, so I can only call these vegetarian.

I also made a cheese variant with smoked Cheddar. They were also very tasty. I managed to find my old favourite smoked cheese, Applewood from Somerset, in our local supermarket. Next time I might make a sausage and cheese combination in one, or what about some added veg? I know that I’m now distancing myself from the Danish classic.

These quick to make sausage rolls would be perfect for serving to surprise guests (of course that doesn’t happen anymore in the modern world, but you know what I mean). 

 

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Your VegHog