#8 Latvia
- Jen
- Nov 7, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Yay! First trip to Europe!
Latvians are pretty inventive when it comes to food. They love curing, pickling, smoking and foraging to turn the flora and fauna from their plains and forests, and lakes and rivers into delicious morsels for warming themselves through the bitterly cold winters, and for simply warming the heart. There are light dishes such as cold beetroot soup and vegetable salads tossed with dill, but most of the fare is heart(attack-inducing)y stuff: pork schnitzels (karbonāde), pork knuckle, pork meatball soup (frikadeļu zupa), pig’s head stew (grūdenis)…in fact, it’s hard to find a meal that doesn’t include pork! Vegetables are often cooked in bacon fat – what a treat (I’d eat three broccolis a day if it tasted like bacon!).
Potatoes and cabbage are served with most meals. They have a variety of fermented cabbage dishes similar to sauerkraut. Tomatoes and cucumbers are pickled and fermented into chutneys, relishes and slaws.
Latvians enjoy dairy. A lot. For example, homemade dry curd cottage cheese with jam for breakfast, or with radishes for lunch, is really popular and they use sour cream in loads of recipes and also as a condiment with almost everything.
Fish is usually smoked, pickled or dried to preserve it through the long winter months.
Rye is the main grain grown and black rye bread (rupjmaize) is a speciality. I read that they reckon the average Latvian eats 50kgs of this bread every year. That would be me eating by bodyweight in bread, which, having just done a guestimate calculation, I definitely already do that!
Mushrooming
Yeah it's a word.
Latvians are super-keen foragers. Early Autumn sees urban residents flock to the forests with baskets and knives to scavenge for their favourite fungi. It provides quality family time and an appreciation of nature as well as the chance to get hold of some porcini or chanterelles for free.
Inspired by this information and always keen to find an activity to keep me out of mischief at the weekend, I booked myself onto a foraging course in Abergavenny at the end of September.
Foraging
Disclaimer: this section has nothing whatsoever to do with Latvian cuisine.
For anyone reading on to learn about which mushrooms are flavoursome/fatal/fun, I’ll tell you now: this didn’t turn out to be a mushroom foraging course; there was not one mushroom in sight. We did find some greater plantain (see left-hand photo below), which is a weed that grows along grassy verges and when heated gives off mushroom-like aromas. The evening after this course I made a very Italian (not Latvian) mushroom risotto with a selection of wild mushrooms (from Waitrose, not nature). I did infuse the risotto with a few greater plantain leaves that I’d found in a field that day so at least there was something picked from the earth with my own fair hands in the dish.
It was a really interesting morning. What I learned is that there is carbon-neutral FREE food growing all around us and we don’t even realise:
· Wall valerian (middle photo below), which just looks like a leafy weed growing out of walls, makes a great salad leaf.
· Itching powder bombs (remember how much drama you used to have with those at primary school? Those and sticky buds!) are actually rosehips (right-hand photo below) and the pod is edible and can be made into skin ointments – obviously throw away the itchy seeds inside before using this on your skin! Adele, our foraging expert, had made a rosehip and elderflower cake for us to eat and it was yummy, all the yummier for knowing that it had been made with ingredients found in the woods where we were eating it.
· Nettles have about a million uses. They can cure UTIs and they can be made into a syrup which apparently is rather enjoyable when added to Prosecco.
· There are 33 types of tree native to northern Europe. I couldn’t tell you what any type of tree looks like, completely clueless, so I’ve recently downloaded The Woodland Trust’s British Trees app, which helps you identify types of trees. It’s really fun (well, a bit fun) walking around Roath Park naming all the trees!
· You can eat Himalayan Balsam! This could be an absolute gem for me working in the water industry!
· I ate roasted dandelion and burdock roots and they were delicious.
I should probably think about cooking something Latvian now!
Latvian baked goods
Pīrāgi are sweet or savoury filled bread rolls, traditionally filled with bacon and onion and usually made for special occasions or celebrations.
I made the filling the day before the dough as it’s easier to handle when cool. The best pīrāgi requires very finely diced filling ingredients but, as ever, I was in quite a rush and didn’t have the patience…so perhaps these aren’t going to be the best pīrāgi …
The dough encasing the bacon is a yeast flour dough enriched with sugar, egg, butter, milk and sour cream (told you they love dairy products!). Kneading with a glass of Merlot and Radio 3 on in the background was the total opposite experience from the manic bacon prep the day before: definition of Jen’s happy place 😊. After kneading, proving and knocking back, I filled and shaped the pīrāgi, as per the photos below. A second prove followed by an egg wash and into the oven they went! Oh my lord, the baking smells were heavenly!
The one (ok, two) I had straight from the oven as a bedtime snack were unreal! They have such a delicate crust, enriching the bread with sour cream is to DIE FOR, and the sweet bread and salty bacon is mind blowing. It was the hardest thing ever only having one (two) before bed! I’m 100% making these again!
Sklandrausis are sweet rye pastry tarts with a carrot and potato filling, usually eaten cold with a cup of tea. It’s the first Latvian dish to be granted Traditional Speciality Guaranteed status by the EU, which means you have to follow a specified method of preparation to call it sklandrausis.
These are bizarre. It was like making a Sunday roast to start with: one pan boiling potatoes and another boiling carrots. The potatoes then became a fairly standard mash (milk, butter, salt) and the carrots were pureed with a LOT of sour cream and honey (that’s three countries and counting for my Nutri-Bullet) and I mixed a couple of beaten eggs in. The pastry was so easy to make: rye flour, melted butter, warm water and just bring it all together to form a dough. I hand-formed the cases (see below), which was as therapeutic as the pīrāgi 😊. No blind bake is required; you just spoon in a thin layer of the mashed potato (which I still thought was weird at this stage) and top with the creamy carrot filling, which, I should mention, had almost the same bowl-licking allure as cake mix. I stuck these little beauties into the oven until they were golden on top and then coated with a sour cream, honey and vanilla topping…and as I’m writing this I’ve just remembered that I was supposed to sprinkle cinnamon on top…I thought they were missing something when I ate one (ok two, you know the drill now) earlier! Apart from that, they were oddly satisfying and like nothing I’ve eaten before. They’re a sweet treat for sure but certainly on the savoury spectrum…and the mashed potato was good but continued to be weird to me throughout the eating part. The pastry was nice and biscuity – no soggy bottoms on my watch!
I made a fairly epic batch of the pīrāgi and took them to Lowri and Rich’s (my favourite married couple) leaving party as they’re moving to Singapore ☹. I think the bacony goodness lessened the blow for most of us. My sklandrausis were taken to work for an “international nibbles” sale…and they were the weirdest thing there!
If I pick out Singapore next I’m 100% flying out there to do my research with Lo and Rich! Sadly not, CAPE VERDE is next.
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