Travelfood

Our four seasons and our public holidays characterize our food as well as the fresh ingredients we have at our disposal at the time. Generally we eat frozen fast food that we cook in the microwave oven, but in the weekends we invest in our favourite foods such as meatballs, oven-baked salmon, macaroni casserole or minced meat sauce. Northern Carelia is known for its oven-cooked meat, Carelian stew, which is a mix of beef and pork cubes and roots.

During midsummer we eat the first potatoes of the season called virgin potatoes. They are just boiled and eaten as such with hering filets in cold sauces or with dill and butter. After midsummer herbs and vegetables ripen and the harvesting culminates in August, when fruit and berries (mainly blueberries, wild raspberries, lingonberries and cloudberries) get their colours and are ready to be picked and sweetened as jam. Forest mushrooms are popular and the first chanterelles are fried with butter already in July and served as an onion and cream sauce with virgin potatoes. October is a hunting month and lots of game is prepared of elk, deer or bird. At Christmas almost every Finn eats ham or turkey with carrot-, rutabaga or potato casserole. Fish is available the whole year round and some fish is best at winter. For example burbot is captured from holes in the ice.

The most exotic ingredient and most popular by tourists in Finland is probably reindeer. I prefer reindeer filet but it is easier to get reindeer stew from restaurants (poronkäristys in Finnish) and that is in practice fried reindeer meat flakes with potato mash and lingonberry mash. For those who want to break their prejudice at Easter, there is something called mämmi available and it looks like cow crap! Actually it is a blend of sweet malt and rye flour. You may also like to try a black sausage, which contains pig blood and barley grains. Also rice grains are used in Finnish cooking: at Christmas as porridge and as a filling in Carelian pies.

I have before written about the importance of the summer cottage and the sauna for Finns. After the sauna and the swim in the lake, there is a taste for barbequed sausage and a beer. The sausage however almost always made of flour instead of wholemeat as elsewhere in Europe. Sometimes the beer is substituted with mead, which is a sweeter alcohol-free version. If the lake or sea offers fish, it tastes best when you smoke it fresh yourself. Have great culinary experiences in Finland!

Europe, Finland, food, travel, travel experiences