Fika: The Art of The Swedish Coffee Break, with Recipes for Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats (3 page)

SERRATED KNIFE
For cutting breads, particularly the denser Scandinavian ones, a serrated knife is very useful. It’s also helpful for many of the sliced cookies in this book, which are cut right after they come out of the oven and don’t cut as easily with a regular knife.

PASTRY BRUSH
For applying egg glazes, a pastry brush is indispensable. If you are looking to buy one, the silicone ones are a bit easier to clean, but you can even use a (clean!) paintbrush as an inexpensive option.

SPATULA
Scraping out all those bowls, and getting to lick the leftover batter in the process, is much easier with a spatula on hand. We recommend the silicone
spatulas that can also be used to stir ingredients over heat.

PASTRY CUTTER
Known in Swedish as a
sporre
, this handled tool with a thin, sharp wheel is used for cutting pastry dough, similar to a pizza cutter.

PASTRY BLENDER
A pastry blender with its curved stainless steel blades makes it easy to cream butter and sugar together by hand.

CHEESE SLICER
While Americans are known to use knives to slice cheese, Swedes would never dream of such a thing. You won’t need this tool for any baking, but when you want a little thinly sliced cheese and jam on top of one of your freshly baked breads or rolls, the
osthyvel
is your new best friend.

KRUSKAVEL
What looks like a textured rolling pin is called a
kruskavel
in Swedish, used in particular for making
Crispbread Crackers
and
Swedish Flatbread
. This is a very typical Swedish device, not often found outside Scandinavia. However, you can easily use a fork to do the same trick and create a beautiful textured design.

DOUGH SCRAPER
Because many of the kinds of dough in this book are kneaded out on a flat surface, like a kitchen countertop or table, a dough scraper is useful in cleaning up the parts that can stick to it. There are two kinds that we find useful. The steel version, which is flat and sharp, is great for scraping off sticky dough bits when you are finished kneading and working the dough. The plastic version, which is soft and has a rounded edge, is good for mixing dough and scraping the edges of the bowl in which you are making the dough.

MORTAR AND PESTLE
For crushing whole spices, a mortar and pestle is very handy and gives you more spice flavor in your finished product, as compared to using an electric grinder, because of the chewable bits of spice seeds that remain. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you can grind your seeds in a spice grinder or a coffee grinder, but grind them coarsely to achieve the same texture you would get from the mortar and pestle.

WHISK
A step up from using a fork, a whisk helps you get your eggs nice and frothy when you beat them. For beating egg whites, we recommend a hand mixer, but in a pinch you can whisk by hand. A mixer makes it easier to achieve the stiffness of egg whites needed in some recipes.

NUT GRINDER
Because of the amount of almond-based recipes in Swedish baking, it’s no surprise that a nut grinder is called a
mandelkvarn
, which means “almond mill.” A staple in many Swedish kitchens, a classic nut grinder can be hard to find elsewhere. You can get around this by processing almonds and other nuts in a food processor. This doesn’t give exactly the consistency and fluffiness of a nut grinder, but it will work (see
Grinding Nuts, opposite). We find that in most recipes it’s nice to have a coarser meal with small pieces of nuts in it.