![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3891_karask.jpg\")
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One of my favourite Estonian foods is karask<\/i>, a barley bread with sour milk.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a staple when I was a child, but my mum made it a few times. Now it’s come back as a commercial product – not in every supermarket, but some do sell it, as well as some artisanal bakeries and food market stalls.<\/p>\n
For some reason I’ve never tried making my own, until very recently. I made a first batch a couple of weeks ago, and another one this weekend.<\/p>\n
What made this one even better than a standard karask<\/i> was the addition of quark to the batter. Barley is great, quark is great, the combination is even better.<\/p>\n
These days quark is a health food: all low-fat or no-fat, marketed for its high protein content, homogenized into a smooth, creamy mass for easy consumption. Back when I was a child, Estonian quark was a solid, dense, rich product. The richer version was 12% fat, I believe, while the skinny kind was 6%. It was sold in paper-wrapped pats, kind of like you’d buy butter today.<\/p>\n
I ran across old-school tvorog<\/i> at the Baltic store. Sold in one-kilogram blocks, grainy and solid, just like it’s supposed to be. Not Estonian but Latvian, I believe (didn’t look to closely at the packaging) but still – what a find. Half of the one-kilo package immediately went into a double recipe of quark karask<\/i>. The other half is in the freezer for when I bake another batch.<\/p>\n
Served warm, with butter and – by suggestion of the recipe page – honey. I never had honey on my karask<\/i> before but why not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of my favourite Estonian foods is karask, a barley bread with sour milk. It wasn’t a staple when I was a child, but my mum made it a few times. Now it’s come back as a commercial product – not in every supermarket, but some do sell it, as well as some artisanal bakeries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,780,745,776,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-estonia","category-food_and_cooking","category-memories","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21347"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21351,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21347\/revisions\/21351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}