Fika: The Art of The Swedish Coffee Break, with Recipes for Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats (4 page)

SILICONE BAKING MAT
Many of the crisp cookies in this book are much easier baked on parchment paper, so to reduce waste, consider investing in a silicone baking mat. It removes parchment paper from the equation and keeps you from having to grease your baking sheets; you will soon wonder how you ever survived without one.

There are a few specific methods that we use throughout our recipes. We have detailed them here so that you know what you’re getting yourself into before you begin baking, and so that you have an easy-to-understand reference point.

MEASURING
Quantities are provided in both volume and weight measurements. Choose whichever method you prefer.

CRUSHING SPICE
SEEDS
The recipes in this book use a lot of spices; you’ll find that for many of them, the recipes ask for whole seeds, crushed. The best way to crush seeds, like anise and cardamom, is to use a mortar and pestle, spice grinder, or even a coffee grinder. Grind until coarsely ground, so you still have a few bits of the seeds. No mortar and pestle and no coffee grinder? Go the old route of placing seeds in a ziplock bag, or folding into a tea towel, and bashing on a flat, sturdy surface with a hammer. If you choose to skip using home-crushed seeds entirely and replace them with preground, be sure to slightly reduce the amount of spice in the recipe. Start small and taste-test as you go along.

GRINDING NUTS
Many of the recipes in this book that involve nuts, like almonds and hazelnuts, call for grinding them. The traditional method for this is to use a nut grinder (opposite), but if you don’t have one on hand, a food processor will work. The recipes that use this method will specify the consistency, be it finely ground, almost finely ground, or coarsely ground. When a recipe calls for finely ground, you want a light and fluffy consistency, almost the same as flour. For nuts ground almost finely ground, there should be an even consistency, but with very small pieces of nuts in the ground mixture. When a recipe calls for coarsely ground, you should have coarse pieces of nuts in the ground mixture, which can also be achieved through chopping by hand.

USING YEAST
Although in Sweden most people bake with fresh yeast, we have adapted these recipes to use active dry yeast. You will find instructions for dissolving and correctly using yeast in the recipes.
The general, method is to dissolve the yeast in a few tablespoons of lukewarm liquid (warm to the touch) to “proof” the yeast and ensure it’s still active, in which case it bubbles up in the warm liquid. Fresh yeast or instant yeast can also be used in these recipes, but be sure to adapt the amount accordingly.

FREEZING DOUGH
If you are making cookies and don’t want to bake the entire batch at one time, you can put the dough in the freezer and take it out when you’re ready to bake again. This works great for dough that is sliced or rolled out, like
Finnish Sticks
or
Swedish Gingersnaps
. To freeze the dough, roll it into a log, tightly wrap it in plastic wrap, and place it in an airtight freezer bag.

GREASING AND FLOURING PANS
In Sweden, cake pans are greased and then sprinkled with fine bread crumbs, especially those recipes made in Bundt pans. This makes for a nice texture on the outside of cakes. When baking cake recipes in this book, feel free to employ this method, or just sprinkle in a little flour after you have greased the pan.

COOLING BAKED GOODS
Many of the recipes in this book end up making a lot of cookies; as opposed to using a cooling rack, which may not fit all of the cookies, it’s easiest to remove them from the baking sheet and cool them directly on the counter. Many of the cookies are also quite small in size, giving them a tendency to fall through cooling racks. Any flat surface will work, like a kitchen table. In some recipes, it’s helpful to have air circulating around the baked goods, in which case a cooling rack is needed and we have specified.

BAKING WITH PAPER LINERS
In Sweden, paper liners are often used for a variety of baked goods, from cookies to cinnamon buns, but that doesn’t mean that they are baked in a muffin tin. When paper liners are specified, you can simply place them directly out on a baking sheet and then place whichever dough or batter you are using in them.

t
o say that Sweden, with a landmass of over 173,000 square miles and a population of about 9.5 million people, is a country of the North would of course be an understatement. Its northernmost tip lies above the Arctic Circle, and even when you’re “down south,” you’re still at approximately the same latitude as Moscow. This is certainly no climate for growing tropical goods like coffee.

How, then, did this country become such a consumer of the drink born from a little dark bean that flourishes in warmer climates? In terms of cups per day, the Scandinavian countries top the list of global coffee consumers, drinking over 39 gallons/150 liters per person in one single year. You’d be hard pressed to find a Swede who doesn’t enjoy a cup of coffee at least once a day, and while in some households tea may be the preferred morning drink, the Swedish coffee break has existed essentially since coffee came to Sweden.

Coffee officially made its way to Sweden in 1685, the first year that a mention of coffee is found in customs documents from Gothenburg, noting that someone had in fact imported a half kilo of beans. Three years later, coffee was available for purchase at the pharmacy. Through the 1700s the importation of coffee grew—King Charles XII himself was said to have brought a coffeemaker from Turkey back to Sweden—but coffee drinking was restricted to men. The original
kaffehus
(coffeehouses) of the era originated in port towns and were visited by sailors and the like; in fact, there was a time when even the word kaffehus was avoided, as it had an unsavory connotation.

Eventually, like much of the rest of Europe, the kaffehus became meeting places for intellectuals and politicians, and coffee culture was in turn equated with the upper echelons of society. As coffee drinking grew, so did the desire to restrain it. King Gustav III was convinced of coffee’s negative health effects and that coffeehouse gatherings could be fodder for antimonarch sentiments, and was also against the drink for economic
reasons, given that it was an expensive, imported luxury good. Coffee ended up being outlawed during his rule, but when people can’t have a certain luxury item, they’re sure to crave more of it, and coffee consumption grew.

In the 1800s, coffeehouses were overtaken by the classic
konditori
, a combination coffeehouse and patisserie. Here the sweet baked goods were just as important as the coffee that was served, and an outing to the local
kondis
, as konditori is often called for short, became a popular Sunday excursion. This was something that you dressed up for and that was considered a special event, a tradition that is very much at the root of today’s popular café and fika culture.

It was around the same time that coffee became a common drink at home, the beverage of politicos and farmers alike. Soon it became a reason for a social gathering, and somewhere along the way the concept of fika was born. It’s no surprise that in Swedish, you often refer to sweet breads as
kaffebröd
, or “coffee bread.” Coffee and baked goods have gone hand in hand for over a century.