Pulla (Coffee Bread)

A unique bread for your tea or coffee break, good to go with either beverage! Do allow plenty of time as preparation does take a while.

Ingredients:

Approximately 10 dl* Flour

5 dl* Milk

50 g Active Dried Yeast (12 g if using Fresh Yeast)

4 Eggs (2 for preparing batter, 2 for glazing)

150 g Butter (melted)

2 dl* Sugar

1.5 tsp Salt

1 tbsp Cardamom (extracted from pods & slightly pounded)

Half a cup of Warm Water

Method:

1. Heat milk and let cool.
   
2. Mix dried yeast in warm water, mix well and add in lukewarm milk. Stir well then add sugar, salt, cardamom, 2 eggs and half the amount of flour to make batter. Beat until dough is smooth and elastic.
   
3. Mix in the rest of flour and add butter. Beat again until batter looks smooth and glossy. Start kneading dough when it is less sticky.
   
4. Turn dough out onto floured surface. Cover with mixing bowl. Let rise approximately 15 mins.
   
5. Knead dough until smooth and satiny. Then bring back into mixing bowl, cover with clean dishtowel. Let rise in warm place until double the original volume. Approximately 1 hour.
   
6. Bring dough on to floured surface again and knead well. Then start to mould the dough for baking. Shape as desired, either braid, or small buns then transfer to baking tray.
   
7. Glaze prepared dough with egg wash, sprinkle sugar or sugar crumbs over glazing, then bake in preheated oven at 225deg celsius for approximately 10mins, or until golden brown. The pulla should look like ones shown below.

For alternate pulla recipes, you could refer to these:

Coffee Bread Ring (Pulla)

Coffee Bread (Pulla)

Finnish Pulla

*dl = desilitre (Amounts to one tenth of a litre. 3 desilitre amounts to 1 full cup.)