Pulla

Scandinavia gets a heck of a lot of stuff right. Its constituent countries consistently top indices of population well-being and happiness, and the general demeanour and approach to life sits rather well with me. There is one thing in particular that Scandinavian countries do extraordinarily well on the whole that I think is not as widely reported as should be - they do marvellous breakfast breads. I've had them in Denmark, Norway and Finland, and they've always been wonderful. Now I think it's no real secret that I'm a big fan of sweet breads - I absolutely love them  (my admittedly not entirely successful experiments with pineapple buns illustrate this). But I came across this recipe for pulla/nisu recently, a Finnish cardamom-spiced bread, and I thought I'd have to try making it (plus, if it's successful, there are some pretty interesting other variants I'd quite like to try too!). I needed to procure a pestle and mortar and figure out where to buy pearl sugar nibs (Waitrose is the answer - although Google does suggest that they're pretty easy to make yourself too) before I could give it a go, but I'm finally ready!

Pulla
Ingredients

• 250ml Milk
• 1 sachet (7g) Dried fast-action yeast
• 90g Caster sugar
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 2 Eggs
• 2 heaped tsp Cardamom pods
• 500g Strong white flour
• 85g Butter
• Pearl sugar nibs to sprinkle

Method

1. Mix the milk, yeast, sugar, salt and one egg in a large mixing bowl.
2. Shell the cardamom pods and grind the seeds with a pestle and mortar, then add to the mixing bowl.
3. Add the flour and butter and combine.
4. Knead until not-entirely-smooth-but-not-very-sticky, then wrap and leave to rise for ~1hr or until roughly doubled in size.
5. Divide the dough into 8 evenly sized portions and shape into balls.
6. Place dough balls widely spaced on greased/lined baking sheets, cover and leave to rise for ~30 mins.
7. Beat the remaining egg with 1tbsp water and brush over the risen dough balls.
8. Sprinkle generously with pearl sugar nibs.
9. Bake at ~220C for 10-15mins.

Here's the dough at step 4, just before the first rise.

Ready for the oven!

They baked a bit unevenly, but no harm done

 They look good, don't they?

 Ever so slightly under-baked, but not horrendously so.

They were a little under-done, and under-proofed, so they were a bit denser than I had hoped for. But they were also wonderfully soft and buttery, which was just what I had hoped for. They were right on the limit of having too much cardamom though, so in future, I think I'll reduce how much I use a bit - the original recipe called for 2tsp of ground cardamom and I was guessing how that translated to - I think it turned out to be about 2 1/2tsp once ground. I also think that the dough could have done with quite a bit more sugar to sweeten it up - as it was, almost all of the sweetness came from the pearl sugar on the top. Overall though, it was a definite success, but with room for improvement still!