Karjalanpaisti - Finnish Karelian hot pot

Few years ago, when I had a chance to live with a Finnish family, I had tasted once the traditional Karjalanpaisti dish. Since then I wanted to make it all by myself. The hot pot is very easy, but the cooking time is very long. The Finns, over the years have modified the recipe adding some ingredients to it, and developing new techniques.
The very original Karelian hot pot, contains only meat (beef or pork), onions, allspice, bay leaves and salt. Lots of people add also carrot and some add even parsnip.

I dig through the internet, to find the perfect recipe, but I ended combining few different ones into one.
The very important thing in preparing this dish is the pot. It should be either made of cast iron or one made of glazed pottery, that can withheld high temperatures.

I, on the other hand, don't have any of those, so I tested my Pyrex glass pot, and it was a good choice :)

So here we go:

Ingredients:

- 700 g of pork and beef, cut into half inch cubes
- 2-3 onions
- 2-3 big carrots
- 10 allspice berries
- 3 bay leaves
- 1/2 tbs salt

1. Cut the beef and pork into half inch cubes; get rid of any excess fat. Leave some fat though for the taste.

2. Chop the onions and cut the carrots into big pieces.

3. Put the meat, onions, carrots and spices in the pot and cover it with the water. You should pour so much water, so that it would just cover the ingredients.

4. Heat the oven to 150°C, and put the pot with he lid on. Leave it there for 2-2,5 hours.

5. Serve hot with boiled potatoes or potato mash.


Now, I made some modifications to the original recipe. The original one says, the oven should be heated up to 225°C, and the hot pot should be baking like this for 1 hour, with the lid. After that, the lid should be taken off and the temperature decreased to 150°C, and the hot pot should stay like this for another hour in the oven.

I set the temperature on 150°C and poured the boiling water on the meat. Then I left the lid on for the whole time the pot was in the oven.
Some people fry the surface of the meat before they put it in the oven. This way the broth is much more clear, but accordingly to the original recipe, the meat should not be fried.

The meat was delicious and soft, mmm.....