Christmas traditions

Traditions are wonderful. And Christmas is the golden time for traditions, when traditional recipes are dug up and quite often the same customs are followed as at Christmas as a child. The whole family bakes gingerbread, makes mustard with Grandma's recipe, and gives archipelago bread made with my mother-in-law's recipe as a gift. These are wonderful traditions!

With marriage, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law come new traditions. There are also traditions from other countries, like the HEIROL family of entrepreneurs, where Cristina comes from Italy and Rolf from Sweden on his mother's side.

In Italy, Christmas table specialities include an antipasto menu of fish delicacies. The main course on Christmas Eve is also often just fish and vegetables, while on Christmas Day it's meat.

And while Italy is full of wonderful desserts and dessert recipes, a more modest dessert is enjoyed on Christmas Eve, consisting mainly of nuts, almonds and dried fruit. The Christmas Day feast is then back to delicious cakes such as panettone and pandoro.

In Sweden, the traditions are pretty much the same as in Finland. The Moborg family has a tradition of Swedish saffron buns for the Christmas table, the recipe for which you can find here.

HEIROL's Jokke makes seasoned pork sausage with Henkka Alén's recipe

SEASONED PORKMEAT SAUSAGE

Ingredients:
1 kg of fatty pork
150 g bacon
1 fresh red chilli
4 cloves of garlic
1 onion
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 bunch of chopped parsley
1 tablespoon salt
2 tbsp olive oil
2,5 dl of stock
pork or sheep intestine

Chop the onions, chillies and garlic. Sauté in a pan in oil until soft and add the spices and tomato puree. Add the meat stock and simmer for 10 minutes. Allow the mixture to cool and grind through a meat grinder.

Stir the mixture into the minced meat and add the parsley. Place the pork intestine at the end of a meat grinder funnel and slowly scrape the mixture into the intestine. Do not put too much meatloaf in the intestine at a time.

At appropriate intervals, roll the long sausage into smaller sausages and tie a piece of intestine between each one. Poke a few holes in the sausage with a fork and simmer in 80 C water for about 10 minutes. Carefully lift the sausage out of the water and cut the sausages apart. Fry in a pan in oil or butter until golden brown.

ARCHIPELAGO BREAD

Ingredients:
1 l buttermilk
75 g yeast
3 dl syrup
3 dl beer malt
3 dl wheat bran
3 dl rye flour
1 tbsp salt
12 dl wheat flour
Add syrup water to the butter, making up 1/3 of the syrup.

Take the buttermilk out of the fridge to warm up to room temperature. Mix the yeast into the room temperature buttermilk and stir well to dissolve the yeast completely, then mix in the other ingredients. Stir carefully so that all the flour is mixed in. Rise the dough for a couple of hours.
The dough will make about four litres so you will need two or three loaf pans to bake it. The dough does not need to be kneaded, but after rising it is poured into well-greased loaf pans.
Bake the bread in the bottom of the oven at 175°C for about two hours. Halfway through baking, brush the bread with syrup water.
Turn the loaves out of the pans onto a wire rack or cutting board to cool. The bread should be allowed to season in the fridge for a couple of days.