Karjalanpiirakat

When I lived in Finland they were pretty much everywhere and good ones are really nice. Since they're not really common in other parts of the world, here's the recipe I've been making for a while now.

Recipe

I used the following recipe as the base (they also have recipes for other fillings): https://www.martat.fi/reseptit/karjalanpiirakat

Ingredients Dough

• 150g water
• 3,75g salt
• 180g whole wheat rye flour (German: Roggenvollkornmehl)
• 60g wheat flour (type 405)

Ingredients Filling

• 160g short grain rice (I use normally Milchreis)
• 180g water
• 560g milk
• 1 egg (size L)
• ca. 1g of salt (depending a bit on preference and what you eat normally with them)

There might be still around 100g of filling left over, depending how much you fill them.

Equipment

• kitchen scale
• mixing bowl
• cooking pot
• oven
• 8cm diameter ring mold
• rolling pin

Step 1: The rice pudding

Combine water, milk, rice and salt in a pot. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to low, reduce the heat to low and simmer with the lid on for about 30 minutes or until the rice looks done.

Step 2: The dough

Combine all the ingredients for the dough and cover in a bowl or cling film so that it doesn't dry out.

Step 3: Mixing the egg into the rice pudding

Once the rice pudding has cooled to under 57 °C, mix in the egg.

Step 4: Cutting the dough into discs

Although not the traditional way, rolling out the dough first and then cutting out the disc works really well.

Step 5: Rolling out and filling

Next, roll out the disc even flatter. There are a lot of different shapes for them, I like them to be a little bit oval.

Step 6: Crimping the edges

They are many techniques of crimping the edges. I like folding the sides over and pinching them from the center outwards.

Here an example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXL29hMDuoE

Step 7: Baking and eating

Bake at 275°C (or pretty much the highest temperature of your oven) for about 14 minutes. Ideally you get some browning on the top and some light charring on the bottom, but not too much.

When eating directly brush the edges with either water or melted butter. I wouldn't do that if you are planning to freeze them. Eat them traditionally with egg butter (munavoi) or whatever you like.

Storage

Although they will probably keep for a while, my main strategy is to bake a lot of them at once and then freeze them. I just freeze them uncovered for 1-2 hours and then put them in sealable bags.

Reheating

There are many ways of reheating them again from frozen. In my experience either the oven or toaster works well. The microwave also technically works, but makes them a bit soggy which I don't like.