How to Cook Karjalanpaisti (Karelian Hot Pot)
Finland's national dish
“You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. Britain is the country with the worst food… after Finland.”
- Jacques Chirac
"I've been to Finland and I had to endure the Finnish diet… they only eat marinated reindeer.”
- Silvio Berlusconi
I want to tell you a quick story about what a terrible excuse for a “foodie” I actually used to be.
Back when I was young and backcombed my hair and was still able to wear skinny jeans without looking like a beanbag propped up by two cocktail sticks, I worked for a very fancy company on London’s Fulham Road. Very fancy. So fancy, in fact, that they occasionally sent me around the world to interview famous people. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores, but often these famous people would be sportspeople. And the places I met them were as exciting to me as Rio and Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur and Barcelona.
To name a handful.
Barcelona is the place I want to talk about today.
After a quick trip to Berlin to see my sister (who lived there at the time), I was asked to go to a workshop in Barcelona and interview the participants for the company website.
Despite almost missing my plane after a panicked return to Berlin from Leipzig (following a night that took in avant garde art shows, much wheat beer, attempts at impressing German girls by talking about Hegel before high-tailing it when they turned out to be Philosophy majors, and eating a terrifying raw pork sandwich called Hackepeter) I made it to Barcelona.
It was a lovely work trip. The workshop was held at the famous Camp Nou football stadium and, if memory serves, I even met some of the FC Barcelona players there. Best of all, having finished work on the Sunday night, my flight back to London wasn’t until late Monday.
This gave me all of Monday to enjoy Barca, alone (gettit?), and to wander around the city like the cultured flâneur I’d always dreamed of being.
I took in Gaudi’s architecture, the Sagrada Família, and spent a hours at the Park Güell.
The missing piece of this cultural puzzle, of course, is the food.
Despite this only being a few years before my Damascene conversion from office drone to restaurant cook, I apparently had such little interest in food that I sampled no local delicacies.
No crema catalana or suquet de peix.
Not even generic tapas in a tourist bar washed down with Estrella Damm.
Instead, unfathomably it feels to me looking back on it, I went to the local Hard Rock fucking Cafe.
At least there’ll always be the Hackepeter.
So, why the 400 word diversion on a misspent work trip in Barcelona?
Well, as someone who now lives a long way from where they grew up, learning about and enjoying the food of my new home has become ever more important to me.
I’m still very much learning to navigate the Finnish language. And I still trip up over the very different cultural norms and niceties that characterise life here.
Food, meanwhile, has been a far simpler thing to navigate. It is a thing I can open myself up to, submit myself to, without judgment, without understanding, without having to learn 15 new noun cases and conjugations.
Food has given me a way of saying, even if only to myself, I want to be a part of this new place. I want this to be my home now.
In short, I haven’t searched out the local Hard Rock cafe yet.
And we always choose Hesburger over McDonalds.
Did I really love dark Finnish rye bread when I first tasted it? Or did I actually just want to love it because I’d fallen in love with a Finnish girl?
Knowing me, I’m pretty sure it was the latter.
One thing I am sure of having enjoyed from the first bite is the ever so traditional Finnish dish of Karjalanpaisti or Karelian Hot Pot.
Karelia (Karjala in Finnish) is an area that now makes up parts of eastern Finland and north-west Russia. The story of Finnish Karelia in the 20th century isn’t an entirely happy one. The Russians invaded in 1939 in what would come to be known as The Winter War. Many communities (including my mother in law’s family) were required to evacuate.
As Finnish Karelians relocated to other parts of Finland, so too they took their food with them. It wasn’t long before two Karelian dishes in particular, the Hot Pot and Karelian pies (karjalanpiirakka), which I’m looking forward to sharing a recipe for in a few weeks, became some of Finland’s most famous foods.
The Karelian Hot Pot is a simple stew of beef chuck, pork shoulder, possibly a few carrots, and seasoned with bay, pepper, and, a spice that pops up a lot in Finnish food, allspice. Like many great stews it was designed to be put together with little effort and left in a cooling baker’s oven to slowly bake throughout the day.
The simplicity runs through the technique as well. Like that other famous Hot Pot from Lancashire, the meat is not browned before being stewed. It also shares the Lancashire Hot Pot characteristic of not traditionally using stock, just water.
No stock and no browning. It pretty much goes against two important lessons I learnt from my classical French training all those years ago.
But I’m happy enough to admit I don’t know better than generations of Karelians, so I’m keeping our recipe as traditional as I can today.
The one flex I am making is to throw a few chunks of oxtail in there to enrich the sauce. I’ve not seen oxtail listed in any recipes I’ve read, but considering the importance of using all the animal to Finnish cooking, I’m sure a few cow tails found their way into a Karelian stew at some point or another over the years.
Here in Finland (and so I read in lots of other Northern Hemisphere places) winter is hitting particularly wintery at the moment. The snow here in Turku has died down, replaced with cold winds and wet, slushy ground. This hot pot is a lovely way of warming the heart during these dark months.
A recipe for Karelian Hot Pot (Karjalanpaisti)
Ingredients (feeds 6)
300g beef chuck
300g pork shoulder
300g oxtail
water
2 bay leaves
8 allspice berries
1 tsp salt
2 medium onions
2 medium carrots
Method
Slice your onion and chop the carrot into thumb-sized chunks, big enough that they won’t fall apart during the long cook. Then dice up the meat into large 1-or 2-inch chunks. I like to keep the chunks quite big as I feel it helps them retain moisture and body.
Place all this in a large casserole dish, dutch oven, or heavy pan with a lid, and add the spices and salt. Add just enough water to so it is almost covering everything. Too much water and the finished sauce will likely be a bit thin. I’m going for more of a braise than a stew here.
Cook at 160°c/320°f without the lid on for upwards of 4 hours or until the meat is beautifully tender. Keeping the lid off will help promote a little caramelisation on the top and concentration of the sauce/broth. But pop the lid on if the colour is getting dark enough or it starts to look like the sauce is reducing too much. You can always top it up with a little more water as well. One last tip: depending on how fatty your meat is, you may want to skim off some fat from the surface at the end of the cooking.
Serve it with buttery mashed potatoes, pickled cucumber, and, if you really want to feel like you’re in Finland, a little lingonberry jam.
Look, I’m not so blinded by love for my adopted home to not understand what Jacques and Silvio were getting at. I know traditional Finnish food doesn’t tick the boxes that refined French cuisine or Italian food does. But what do you expect from a cuisine that is the product of a growing season lasting little more than 3 months out of the year?
When I have a plate of karjalanpaisti in front of me, or, sure, even some marinated reindeer, I’m glad I’m the kind of guy capable of appreciating both the joys of what the Italians do, as well as what makes Finnish food as lovely as I think it is.
I hope this recipe shows you as well.
And if it doesn’t then wait until I show you those Karelian pies I mentioned. They are a treat.
See you next time,
Wil
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I’ve only ever had fabulous food when hosted by your mother in law . Absolutely delicious 🥘
For all I've indulged my Finland-curious side over the past few years, I admit I haven't delved much into the food. It's been weirdly intimidating, what with all the long names with their repeating vowels, but this dish looks so delicious and comforting and familiar - down to the allspice, which I use in stews and roasts today and has always reminded me of childhood (not surprising, I guess, considering I grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.) Adding this to my menu this month for sure.