Korvapuusti (Pulla Rolls)

Chris went to Finland recently and loved some of their breads and pastries. In particular, he was enamored with the various cardamom breads. Among these were korvapuusti, which means "a slap on the ear" or some such (named, I assume, because of how you cut them; they look a like an ear).  Korvapuusti are a rolled pastry with lots of cardamom, both in the dough and in the filling.

Naturally, we decided to try to make these at home. We adapted a recipe from Kinfolk, though they just call the recipe Pulla.

Korvapuusti
makes 8

Ingredients:

For the dough:
1 tablespoon yeast (~10 grams)
8-7/8 ounces of milk (250 grams)
17-1/2 ounces ap flour (500 grams)
5-1/4 ounces sugar (150 grams)
1/2 tablespoon cardamom seeds (I did 3 grams ground cardamom)
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter, softened

For the filling:
9 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar (100 grams)
2-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon (7-1/2 grams)
1-1/2 teaspoons cardamom (3 grams)

To top with:
1 egg, beaten
Pearl sugar (or regular if you don't have pearl)

Directions:
1. Warm the milk to about 95°F (warm but still touchable)

2. Add the yeast to the milk and let stand about 5 minutes

3. Mix in the flour, sugar, cardamom and salt

4. Add butter, then knead until smooth, elastic and only slightly sticky, at least 10 minutes by hand

5. Cover and let rise until doubled (1 hour)

6. Mix the sugar and spices for the filling together, then beat into the butter until creamed

7. Lightly flour a surface, if necessary, then turn out the risen dough and roll into a 10" by 16" rectangle (should be ~1/4" in height)

8. Smooth the creamed butter out to the very edges of the dough

9. Beginning with the 10" side of the rectangle, roll the dough into a tight cylinder

10. Position the flap at the top of the roll (you'll be pinching it closed or placing it on bottom in a moment, to make sure it will stay closed during baking), and cut into 8 triangles (scalene at the sides, isosceles in the middle of the roll...and well, mostly triangle I should say, because you want to leave the outer most roll layer attached to itself, so really, a trapezoid with one edge really tiny...)

11. Pinch the top point of the triangle and bring toward the center (the bottom of the triangle ends up on the bottom of the korvapuusti, and the top gets pushed down into the center so that it really quite looks like an ear)

12. Cover a baking tray with parchment paper, and place the korvapuusti ~2" from each other; cover and let rise until dough is doubled

13. During last 15 minutes of rising, preheat oven to 400°F

14. Brush the korvapuusti with egg and sprinkle with sugar

15. Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown

Baklava

For Labor Day weekend, Chris, Neil and I went for a lovely hike in Ansel Adams Wilderness. As that's in the Sierra Nevadas and we live around SF Bay, we had to go across the Central Valley. And my, even growing up in farmland in the Midwest doesn't prepare you for the farms of Central Valley. Fields and orchards and orchards and fields! So vastly many different crops that you'd never expect to be able to grow right next to each other!

Among other things, we picked up a bag full of roasted pistachios. Seeing as it's been so long since I've had baklava, I knew just what to do with my largess of pistachios, too. After sifting through a few recipes, I found the perfect one for me. I got the oranges fresh from my orange tree, shelled all those pistachios (a bit of an undertaking, best done a cup at a time or with more than one person), and set to. It was heavenly!

Pistachio Baklava with Orange-Cardamom Syrup
adapted from Molly Wizenburg via Bon Appétit

Ingredients
1 1/4 cups plus 1/4 cup sugar, divided
1 1/4 cups fresh orange juice
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom
12 ounces shelled pistachios, toasted (scant 3 cups)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
30-40 13x9-inch sheets phyllo dough (2/3 pound, give or take)

1. If your pistachios aren't already roasted and shelled, it will likely take you about 3 hours to do both

2. Chop your toasted and shelled pistachios until you like the texture (for me, it's rather fine, but some people like a larger nut to bite into in their baklava)

3. Mix the nuts with 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon

4. Preheat the oven to 350°F

5. Melt the butter a half stick at a time during this next step, otherwise the last of it will end up quite milky (alternatively, use ghee)

6. Lay out the phyllo dough according to the instructions on the box (usually this entails laying it out flat and covering it with a damp cloth inbetween pulling off sheets) and trim if necessary (I don't as I like a little extra phyllo up the sides of my pan)

7. Butter the bottom of a 13x9-inch baking pan and layer the phyllo dough in, buttering each (or every other) sheet until you have 8 to 14 layers

8. Spread out one half of the nut mixture, then repeat layering in phyllo (be very gentle with the first layer above the nuts as it's easy to poke through)

9. Repeat step 8

10. As you can't cut phyllo after it's baked without crushing it, you'll cut the triangles now, leaving a thin layer on bottom uncut

11. Bake for 1 hour or until golden brown

12. During the latter half hour while the baklava bakes, you'll make the syrup. Bring the juice, 1 1/4 cups sugar and cardamom to a boil and reduce to 1 1/2 cups total liquid (if you add much more than that to the baklava, it will be soggy)

13. Once you pull the baklava from the oven, you'll pour the syrup over it (it will bubble a lot!), then let the baklava cool

Store baklava at room temperature at least overnight so that it can finish soaking up all the syrup. Then put it in an air-tight container and store either at room temperature (can last at least a week I'm told, though mine has never made it that long) or in the fridge.