Running Chick

Today, I made nisu (also known as pulla) and it didn’t suck.

I used my grandma’s recipe, which is probably older than I am (old!) but scaled it down to make two loaves instead of five.

I got to do two fun things during the course of preparation. The first was scalding milk. I’m pretty sure I’ve done this before on accident, but I never realized I was doing something other than “boiling the milk”. The second was smashing the begeezers out of cardamom seeds with a mallet. I suppose I could have used ground cardamom but NOT AUTHENTIC so I bashed those little seeds to within an inch of their life.

So, outside of making the dough, the process isn’t really too tricky, just long. You make up the dough, then let it rise until it doubles in size, then you knead it for a bit, cut it into sections for braiding (in my case, six sections), braid it up, then stick it back in the oven to rise again. Then you bake it for 30 minutes and when it’s done, brush on a syrup of coffee & sugar.  I used the oven to do the rising, first warming it up to 200, then shutting it off and popping in the dough. The first rise took around 90 minutes, the second around an hour.

Here’s the dough after it’s been braided and it’s risen for the second time.

And here’s the finished product. I somehow ended up with one giant loaf and one normal sized loaf so clearly I failed in the dividing up the dough equally section, but overall they look normal ...

… and taste gooood.

Kitties were impressed.

Happy New Year!